Posts Tagged ‘mind atrophy’
Technology and atrophy
For machines to mimic life effectively in the future, they’ll have to have some sort of cretinization built into their speech patterns; not just profanity, but grammatical mistakes, moronic acronyms, spelling errors… the children of the future (hell, the children of right now!) will simply not understand correct English (having grown up immersed in technology that so simplifies the cognitive demands of daily life as to reduce everything to a level accessible to any mouth breather who can tap tap tap on a rectangle).
Any machine that doesn’t talk like them will be marked instantly.
Now, I don’t think the technology has to have that effect, I think it tends to, much as physical labor saving devices tend to make people more likely to be weak or obese, though we now know more about nutrition and physical training than at any time in history, and it’s arguably easier to achieve higher levels of physical fitness now than it’s ever been.
So, most people born after, say, 1986, seem to talk like barely functional morons, even those with high levels of natural intelligence.
All of this enables physical and intellectual laziness, often to the point of dependency. Minds and bodies atrophy when neglected, and change with use; social media in particular seems to be the most damaging technology since the introduction of commercial television.
It’s not enough to have a high innate level of intelligence to be meaningfully intelligent, just as it isn’t enough to be naturally fast or strong to run or lift competitively; you have to work to develop whatever capacities you have. If people with naturally high levels of intelligence spend all of their lives, from earliest youth, immersed in a manipulative noise stream, stimulating various impulses and having them gratified immediately, staring at video feeds (with whatever text they do read confined to a 3rd grade or lower level of vocabulary and complexity), they just won’t be able to do things like read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or write The Magic Mountain. Most of their time will be spent exchanging LOLz and tweeting 2 minute clips of people hurting themselves, or celebrity gossip.
Just like the post-humans in Wall-E (except such people would never choose, en masse, to leave their states of coddled, fully interactive, hyper-stimulated, imbecile sloth).
Planet Ulrich 