I was watching this the other day, and it begins with a rather disturbing premise. People are getting stupider. This isn’t just an observation or an opinion, because you get that every day, millions and millions of times around the world, from grumpy old men like myself. Damned ignorant kids these days.
No, this is something that might actually be true. 14 IQ points, they say, is what the human average has dropped since the Victorian era. The scientist who originally came up with the theory, Gerald Crabtree of Stanford, says we probably actually hit our intellectual peak as a species at the end of the hunter gatherer era, when everybody alive had to be like Bear Grylls, or they didn’t stay alive. Once people started living on farms, and having a cushier life style, the stupid kids started surviving and breeding right along with the smart ones, and that’s been true in every generation since.
They were probably smarter than us
I’m not too worried, because there are percentages and numbers. Out of the 7 billion people alive today, sure, most of them are dumb as posts, but there are more smart people than ever before, because there are vastly so many more people.
But also, I think (I know I’ve mentioned this before) we are near the point of artificial intelligence. Just like Oscar Pistorius’ legs are faster than real legs, soon we will have artificial eyes that are better than real eyes (not just a little bit stronger, but different – able to see more colors, to see in infrared light perhaps, maybe with a zoom feature and a built in camera. We will have artificial ears that can hear a pin drop in a pile of bear shit in the forest during a rainstorm.
Why should artificial intelligence be any different? As soon as we’ve passed the Turing Hurdle, robot brains will outstrip humans quickly and never look back – they will constantly be building smarter versions of themselves and people will just wander around, reading celebrity magazines, eating donuts, drinking wine from boxes, climbing trees, and making love in the tall, green grass.
The robots will pick up the mess.
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