Computers Make You Stupid

We human beings want to understand how things work. That's why we don't live in caves anymore, and why we do things like traveling to the moon and building computers. We have collected enormous amounts of information, and the giants whose shoulders we are standing on have never been taller.

Information doesn't go away once it is understood. It accumulates. The total amount of information and knowledge in the world is increasing exponentially. As Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams, lets Dogbert explain it: The information is pouring into your brains like a fire hose directed at a teacup. We just can't handle all of it.

A couple hundred years ago it was possible for a well educated person to understand everything that was going on in the theoretical sciences, but the level of specialization and detail is so high nowadays that this can't be done anymore. Instead the scientists concentrate on a small field of science, and as new understanding arises, they usually have to concentrate on an even smaller field. Thus the knowledge of science expands and grows like a tree, with new branches and twigs continuously appearing. The total sum of knowledge expands faster than we are able to understand it, so, relatively speaking, we become more stupid each day.

Most people using cars have a basic understanding of how the car works, and if they don't, it's relatively easy to teach them. The gears, brakes, clutch and the engine of a modern car is still basically very simple mechanical parts. When gas is ignited, it explodes and pushes the piston which in turn rotates the axle with drives the wheels. It's all very intuitive, we understand how a car works, just like people a thousand years ago understood how their horse carriages worked.

Now pick a person at random and try to explain to him/her how Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity implicates that time moves slower if you travel faster. (Provided that you understand all of it yourself. I surely don't.) Chances are you won't succeed, because this is not intuitive at all. It doesn't make sense. Most of us understand Einsteins relativistic effects as much as we understand Stephen Hawking's concept of imaginary time, which is none at all. So, science seems to be sending us back to the stone age. Not by nuclear wars, (even though that of course could happen) but by evolving so fast that we are left in a world where we don't understand how things work, just like people in the stone age.

People nowadays don't believe in magic. Still we use lots of devices and gadgets without knowing how they work. John Doe can pick up his cellular phone, dial a number and talk to his cousin on the other side of the world, but he can not explain how this is possible. He can send email, but he has no clue about how the message is transported through the Internet. Your average John Doe probably doesn't even know what electricity is, it's all magical staffs and magical formulas to him.

Then we have the magicians. I, and most of you who are reading this can explain to a fairly high level of detail how a computer works. That makes us the 21st century equivalent of magicians and sorcerers to people like Mr. John Doe. But personally, my knowledge of the internals of a CPU is very limited, and my knowledge of sciences like genetic engineering and theoretical physic is even less. It's all bells and whistles to me. Pure magic.

This brings us back to the lead-in of this article. We want to understand how things work. But we are only able to understand a very limited part of all of the science and technology we use and read about every day. The psychologist Marianne Frankenhäuser, professor at the university of Stockholm, Sweden says this about the phenomenon: As the we receive ever increasing amounts of information, with increasing demands of fast decision making, we react the same way as the first human beings: We are stressed. We loose our sense of perspective, and instead achieve tunnel vision, only enabling us to see what lies straight ahead of us. We loose our creative abilities and stop listening to reason. This leads to us making bad decisions and perform poorly.

I'm not saying that technology in general is bad. The problem is that we invent technology that we can't handle. Quoting Douglas Adams' The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy: To summarize the summary of the summary: People are a problem.

On the other hand, we human beings are known (at least among ourselves) to adapt quickly to new conditions. After all, we advanced from the stone age into the space age in a matter of seconds, on an evolutionary scale, and we still haven't wiped ourselves out. That is quite a feat in itself. But I still think the human consciousness is lagging behind when it comes to computer technology and communication. There is the selected few who understand and develop the technology, and then there is the great masses, who are able to use the devices, but not to understand them.

In a sense we're not standing on the shoulders of giants anymore, we're building giants and running around between their feet, hoping they will serve our needs and not crush us in the process.

All of this makes me believe the movie The Matrix has a point: If I belonged to a type of self aware, super intelligent, powerful, self sufficient robots, my first thought would be: We don't really NEED those weak, pathetic, stupid sacks of meat, do we?