{ "item_title" : "Are We Getting Dumber, or Just Less Practised?", "item_author" : [" Andrew John Parkes "], "item_description" : "Are we getting dumber, or just less practised?When did you last work something out for yourself when a machine could have done it for you?Sat navs find our way. Calculators do our sums. Phones remember our numbers, search engines retrieve our facts, and now artificial intelligence can write our letters and explain what we read. Each one makes life easier. But what happens to us when we no longer need to do these things ourselves?Are We Getting Dumber? is a thoughtful, balanced look at the real price of convenience. It is not an anti-technology book. The author thinks technology is wonderful and uses it every day. Nor is it a nostalgic complaint that life was better when everything took longer. Instead, it asks a more useful question than the one in the title: which abilities are we still practising, which are we letting go, and do we know what we would lose?Drawing on research from psychology, education, neuroscience and medicine, and on personal stories from a lifetime of watching technology change everyday life, the book separates what has actually been shown from what merely sounds plausible. Along the way you will discover: Why the famous claim that we have a shorter attention span than a goldfish is a mythWhat studies of London taxi drivers and GPS users suggest about skills we use and skills we don'tWhy intelligence test scores rose for most of a century, and what we do and don't know about why they have stalled in some countriesHow searching the internet can make us feel cleverer than we are, and why a quick answer is not the same as understandingWhat early studies of AI assistants suggest about learning, writing and creativityWhy growing up with technology doesn't automatically make anyone skilled at using it, and why blaming the young is the wrong responseWhy the effort that feels like failure is often the effort that makes learning stickA practical way of living with technology that keeps what matters, built on five simple habitsWritten in plain, friendly language, this book is for anyone who has caught themselves reaching for a screen instead of thinking, whether you are a parent, a teacher, a professional or simply curious. It doesn't tell you to give anything up. It helps you decide, task by task, what to hand over and what to keep.Because this subject is changing fast, the book is honest about the limits of the evidence, especially on artificial intelligence, and encourages you to look for newer findings.Before you hand the next task to a machine, it might be worth asking one simple question: if I stop doing this for myself, what might I eventually lose?", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/816/763/9798167639294_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "10.06", "online_price" : "10.06", "our_price" : "10.06", "club_price" : "10.06", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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