Comment by tarkin2
11 hours ago
Arguably we already have, if you concentrate on intelligence rates since 1975: the reverse Flynn affect. Those who grew up about that time no longer had to generate their own entertainment through storytelling, make their own music, calculate things mentally: everyday they had music, entertainment pumped into their homes, a way to avoid athematic, etc. And now we're evening thinking a lot less in our jobs, not even practicing the skills we learnt. Intelligence is only going to decrease.
Yeah it's as old as time to be honest.
When Plato complains about writing diminishing our faculties for memorizing things, it's sometimes treated as an example of how we've always pointlessly worried about these things, but he was absolutely correct and the transition from an oral culture to a written culture has absolutely demolished those capabilities.
Writing as a technology ended up having strong upsides that mostly made up for that (in particular our ability to communicate across distances and time, to read Plato's concerns without 100 generations of Chinese whispers), but it was a trade-off, as most technologies tend to be.
But displacing individual ability is a feature, not a bug.
How else could mind-virus like philosophy or religion or science or political legitimacy transit highly-variable humans for generations?
Religious organizations, governments, corporations all far outlive their founders and maintainers. Heroes at best only stretch or squeeze the dogma or methodology to grow the organization by better fitting to the culture.
And because organizations accumulate control over resources, individuals can have little effect outside them.
We are disposable by design.
Yeah I think a worrying thought is that it has to be that way. A big conundrum for technologically advanced societies is that technology gives us so much power that if people are anything but weak and helpless, they become so dangerous it makes society unfeasible.
Somehow we need to contend with killdozers, school shooters, anthrax mailers, and so on being much more capable than anything even a particularly yoked antiquity nerd like Plato ever could be.
Honestly curious why you're being downvoted, but I think about this all the time. We always focus on the positives of any new technology and the negatives are either invisible (till later) or glossed over.
Not my idea though, greater minds than I have talked about this a lot: Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, etc..
It makes me so angry that an entire branch of "science" gets to just take data and go "I dunno man, maybe kids are just dumber". There's so much of this in social science. Take some measurable thing, and then just wildly speculate about the cause of it in an entirely untestable way, and then test that theory in ways that absolutely do not justify the conclusions. At the very least, the whole field should get a lesson in how to communicate the certainty of their theories and conclusions. You've got some guys hanging around couching their uncertainty when they're banging sub atomic particles together at the speed of light and then you've got some social science bro being like "If you move that checkbox on that form to the bottom it'll be way more effective, trust me bro I've hacked how people think".