I watch a lot of YouTube videos, not the ones with cats though, the ones where ideas are posted and discussed. I, like everyone else, form my ideas and thoughts as a mash-up of other people’s thoughts and output, that which I find compelling, not pleasing, compelling in an intellectual sense, then I perform a remix of that mash-up to make it my own. Very rarely do I write something that I have gotten the spark for from one person, one book, or one YouTube video. This one, however, I may have, though I think a lot of it is from lingering remembrances of other things I may have absorbed from various sources. I do think it is dangerous to base one’s thinking in a single source, but like the infamous historian David Irving has stated, a lot of writing, especially on history, is just plagiarism multiplied, as the main journalists just repeat each other until their output becomes the canon of knowledge for all other subsequent writers to draw from. In modern social media, the algorithm can make the sources abundant because it controls the spread of the content, so a repeated, yet slightly modified, message can appear to be multi sourced yet still be the output of one agency, this works because we equate the quality of the news with the quantity of the repetition rather than the validity of the source or any sort of examination of the motivations that may be behind it.
On to the content of the piece… There is a theory, I have no idea who’s it is, but it states that people of affluence tend to be better educated and healthier, and they tend to marry other people who are in the same circumstances. Because they are smarter they tend to consider their reproductive choices more carefully, so have less children by choice. This is measurable, the more affluent the populous of any region is, the less they tend to procreate. Conversely, people with low affluence and resources tend to have more children, often having large families. This may be because they do not see the merits of doing otherwise, or it may be based on some other reason. This results in, if you know anything about mathematics, and also if you believe that there are genetic components to intellect (I do believe this), the conditions where dumb then out-breeds smart, and over a long period of time, dumb may eliminate smart. This theory is only based on genetic ability, which we all believe can be defied, if we didn’t then we would not try at anything we were not immediately suited to.
I’m not sure I agree with the above, but it is interesting to think about. Universal mass education in western nations tends to fight against this effect, but only where that education is uniformly available. If dumb gets only to learn to be a follower, and smart gets only to learn those traits of leadership, then education may be of little use to stem the flow of the effects.
There is another theory that goes along the lines of stating that people are validated by their efforts, that hard work is a good thing and laziness is a bad thing. This one I am going to ague with immediately. We are a fool when we work hard when there is a better, more efficient, way of doing something that might become apparent if we used our intellect instead of our might. Hard work is the thing that must be done only in the absence of the better technology or tool. We are innovative when we are lazy, not when we are at maximum effort. Nobody ever invented anything to stand in place of hard work if they were satisfied by doing hard work, if they felt validated and actualised by it in a Maslowian sense. This explains why some religious movements actively shun machinery and technology, but they happen to be quite selective in doing so, opting for some technologies that reduce labour, but only up until the point where it does not spare the back and the knees of the followers too much. I have a theory on this, that people think less when constantly busy, so there is a push by those that benefit the most, usually the tribes people with the biggest house, to get adherents to any tribal mentality to come to value effort and hardship above thinking and innovating.
Can technology make us smarter, maybe, but it can also make us much dumber and less able. As machinery is invented to make the things that people once made, those people lose the ability to make those things, and only retain the ability to operate the machines that make things. We marvel at how fast children take to the technological world, yet we also know that if the technology were to disappear then they would be lost and unable to build the things that the machinery makes now using the technology they can operate. A 3-D printer can make a weapon from a template, but what are the principles that make the weapon successful at propelling a projectile though air using an explosive chemical force harnessed within a tube? The self loading rifle was invented centuries after the musket, that means that people who knew these devices very well, and would have longed not to have to tamp a squid and a ball into the metal barrel, did not realise that this could be done, and for a long time relied on harder work. When the contained bullet, and then the self loader, were invented, nobody yearned to keep tamping.
My personal bug-bear, and I suppose I am just being a generational echo chamber in this, since my father and grandfather likely thought the same way when the world changed for them as it has now for me, is that some things are lost when technology is abstract rather than fundamental. There is nothing fundamental about a fifth generation programming language that is module based. Yes it is an impressive piece of work and more effective than binary, but it only requires the user to understand syntax and terminology, not mathematics and the fundamentals of electronic circuitry. In this way, and in many other ways, we have allowed technology to supplant human intellect, and we are now patting ourselves on the back for the coming age of AI, which will prove better than us in every way possible. I can use my AI to read and respond to the email you used your AI to create and send to me, that way neither of us would have to read our emails at all, they could get on with it without us. In time we will replace all production and commerce with machinery and AI, leaving us with no reason to be. what will we do then?
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