I better enjoy the next two or three days.\u00a0 Saturday I\u2019ll be driving into NYC for a family occasion and then next Tuesday will be a long, long day at work.\u00a0 So, what would be fun to talk about today?\u00a0 Well, maybe not fun exactly.<\/p>\n
Who is the smartest man in the world?\u00a0 And what does that even mean?\u00a0 Is he a physicist like Einstein who has the best understanding of how the universe works?\u00a0 Or is he the guy who can profit most from how the human universe works and make the most money?\u00a0 Is it a saint or a philosopher?\u00a0 Or is he the guy who enjoys his life most?\u00a0 I guess if I asked a million people I\u2019d get a bunch of different answers.<\/p>\n
But from a practical point of view, we need very soon to find a very smart man to run this country.\u00a0 And by extension he will have to run the world.\u00a0 The world is very, very broken.\u00a0 With the Internet and AI, we seem to have run the next generation of people off the tracks and into a ditch.\u00a0 We\u2019ve rendered education useless and even unattainable.\u00a0 The younger generation can no longer even contemplate reading an entire book.\u00a0 They no longer have the attention span or the interest.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
This cannot go on.<\/p>\n
Other than shutting off the Internet I don\u2019t know what can be done.\u00a0 It seems like we need to re-invent real life for a generation of young people.\u00a0 But I just don\u2019t know how it will be done.\u00a0 The first step would be to make schools completely opaque to the cell phone signals and to turn off all wi-fi.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I understand that the productivity that we\u2019ve gained through automation is astonishing.\u00a0 One person can now produce the work that a whole office formerly could.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You read about the levels of depression and mental illness, especially in young women and you have to think that this cannot go on.<\/p>\n
But the thing that isn\u2019t clear to me is how the break will occur.\u00a0 Will the dysfunction just continue to increase until some critical system fails through incompetence?\u00a0 Will a power grid completely collapse during winter and many thousands of people will freeze to death or something equally horrendous happen?\u00a0 Maybe it won\u2019t be a bang but instead a whimper.\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n
I tend to believe this is a \u201cfirst world problem.\u201d\u00a0 Our peers in China and India will not be following us down the road to oblivion.\u00a0 They need to keep up in order to eat.\u00a0 Maybe this is just a matter of getting a little hungry to focus the mind on what is important.<\/p>\n
Well, anyway, I think we\u2019re deep trouble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I better enjoy the next two or three days.\u00a0 Saturday I\u2019ll be driving into NYC for a family occasion and then next Tuesday will be<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"yoast_head":"\n