I suppose that’s why I was interested in Nicholas Carr’s recent article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic. He makes a similar confession, although, despite much rambling and speculation, doesn’t arrive at any helpful conclusions to help us explain this shift.

Motoko Rich has a related article in today’s Times, “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?,” which scarily illustrates how today’s teenagers with Internet access may never read an actual book. Until this morning, I had only worried about my generation--I remember being so engrossed in reading as a child that my parents would have to put a hand between my eyes and the page in order to get my attention--but now we see the first generation that will live their entire lives with high-speed net access. I was born “unplugged,” and opted in at my own volition. But these kids were born plugged in, and they may never know life any other way.

So in 20, 30 years, when these kids are our leaders, debaters, thinkers, policy makers and caretakers, what and how will they be thinking?

I was exploring Lawrence Lessig’s blog earlier and noticed that his commenting system uses reCAPTCHA, a CAPTCHA system run out of Carnegie Mellon.

What’s interesting about reCAPTCHA is that the words shown are unknown, even to the system. A regular CAPTCHA displays known words in distorted text, hopefully in such a way that only humans (and not spam robots) can read them. The human user types in the characters shown, and the system validates that the entry is correct.

reCAPTCHA uses words scanned from old books, and correlates the user’s input to a portion of the original work. Like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the Carnegie Mellon system deploys micro-tasks and takes advantage of distributed human labor to complete giant projects via minimal contributions of many. The idea, of course, is to perform OCR on books that are not practical to digitize using software (due to blurry letters, old typefaces, etc.).