Clever technology vs. Stupid people

It seems almost scary how many people repeats the thoughts of neuro-theolog Manfred Spitzer that technology makes us stupid. Yes, we may be more dependent on it. Bit the issue isn't that men are leaving their work and women stop caring for the children because of technology.

Information without control

So many people repeats the thoughts of a sixty year old therapist without understanding how many crazy and simplifying theories came out of sixty year old psychiatrists, starting with psychoanalysis that convert most of art into penises and vaginas and ending with the socialistic theory of higher emotions (those were the „correct“ emotions that made people run under a tank with grenade) The thing is, watching something happen and interpreting it are two very different things.

I do have one huge advantage compared to Spintzner, I‘m not a outsider – I come from the generation of children who voluntarily switched from the outside to computers. And at that time computers were solely for nerds.

Originally technologies were quite elitist and with a few exceptions like gaming, were very demanding to know what you are doing. And it wasn't until the internet became a big thing that brought the social aspect to it that masses adopted technologies into their daily lives.

And that is the base of what bothers Spitzner and conservative people in general. The modern thinking that somewhere out there is factually correct information. You no longer need to learn a map, because you have it in your phone and somebody is keeping it updated. This „somewhere“ and „someone“ is uncertain and it makes them really angry. Instead of using the information certified by either the government or a big company you can consume an incredible amount of not very censored information on-line.

Uneducation?

Humankind isn't different because of technologies. It doesn't degenerate because of them either, just some of it traits are getting more attention thanks to it. What may seem as an inability to focus (also known as ignorance or uneducation) is just a much quicker absorption of a much higher amount of information, with which teachers are yet to learn to cope with.

In reality it opens the door for a completely new way of education based on giving talented people the option to give them just the basics and let them find the rest themselves. This is a wide opened space for someone who will reject the current dogma and will try to teach using this never-ending fast stream of information.

It doesn't destroy the old and nor does the old lose its relevancy. You just need to understand how probably will some of the old information be used. And the ones that are less probable, like the „SAS Survival Guide“ or „How to hunt using only tools made from a tree“ need to be shrank into a small compact manual and we must hope that they will never have to be used by the future generations.