I Think We’re in Deep Trouble

I better enjoy the next two or three days.  Saturday I’ll be driving into NYC for a family occasion and then next Tuesday will be a long, long day at work.  So, what would be fun to talk about today?  Well, maybe not fun exactly.

Who is the smartest man in the world?  And what does that even mean?  Is he a physicist like Einstein who has the best understanding of how the universe works?  Or is he the guy who can profit most from how the human universe works and make the most money?  Is it a saint or a philosopher?  Or is he the guy who enjoys his life most?  I guess if I asked a million people I’d get a bunch of different answers.

But from a practical point of view, we need very soon to find a very smart man to run this country.  And by extension he will have to run the world.  The world is very, very broken.  With the Internet and AI, we seem to have run the next generation of people off the tracks and into a ditch.  We’ve rendered education useless and even unattainable.  The younger generation can no longer even contemplate reading an entire book.  They no longer have the attention span or the interest.  Just watching a five-minute YouTube video to get a thumbnail sketch of the plot of a book is more than too much for them.  They immediately get ChatGPT to write a book report for them and hand it in to their teacher and never even think about it again.

This cannot go on.

Other than shutting off the Internet I don’t know what can be done.  It seems like we need to re-invent real life for a generation of young people.  But I just don’t know how it will be done.  The first step would be to make schools completely opaque to the cell phone signals and to turn off all wi-fi.  Then for good measure make the students hand in their phones and either write their work with pen and paper or use some kind of proprietary software that only allows them to input text through the keyboard with their fingers.

I understand that the productivity that we’ve gained through automation is astonishing.  One person can now produce the work that a whole office formerly could.  But at the same time, the society we are creating is deeply dysfunctional and it is no longer producing happy, normal or even sane people.  You read about the levels of depression and mental illness, especially in young women and you have to think that this cannot go on.

But the thing that isn’t clear to me is how the break will occur.  Will the dysfunction just continue to increase until some critical system fails through incompetence?  Will a power grid completely collapse during winter and many thousands of people will freeze to death or something equally horrendous happen?  Maybe it won’t be a bang but instead a whimper.  Will more and mor of our infrastructure and functionality be handled by a smaller and smaller human work force until the useless majority simply die off entirely?

I tend to believe this is a “first world problem.”  Our peers in China and India will not be following us down the road to oblivion.  They need to keep up in order to eat.  Maybe this is just a matter of getting a little hungry to focus the mind on what is important.

Well, anyway, I think we’re deep trouble.