The Future of Thinking

It’s pretty clear that a lot of the world’s problems are caused by people being stupider than we should be.  We live on a planet that is practically made out of food – it grows in the dirt, it walks the land, it swims in the seas, it hangs on the trees like harvest Christmas – and yet people are

They do not lie, take bribes, or pick up gay hookers on Craigslist

going hungry.  We have the resources to produce enough bricks, concrete, glass, steel and plastic to build everybody a home a hundred times over, and yet people are homeless.  We have the manpower to give everybody a good education and  health care and yet, people are unemployed AND schools and hospitals are understaffed.  We have the resources, the technology and the manpower for Earth to become an absolutely awesome, paradise planet and yet we’re still fighting wars.  I don’t understand it.

Then, my friend Alan Thomas posted this on my facebook page:

Alan’s inane prediction #1: In the future if you are not ADD you will be at a disadvantage.

Alan’s inane prediction #2: In the future, linear thought will be thought of as oldfashioned.

Alan’s inane prediction #3: In the future, dumb people will be thought of as smart because smart people will have turned over thinking to algorithms.

In some ways, 1 and 2 are already true in the present.  When you are trying to watch TV, read facebook, send tweets and carry on a conversation at the same time, focus and a long term attention span do not exactly work to your advantage.  And the beginnings of the end of linear thought were already there in the ’60s.  When we said we were trying to expand our minds, we were definitely thinking of more than one dimension.

It’s #3 that I want to address.  Certain aspects of thinking already can, and should, be turned over to algorithms.  When I hear teabaggers saying that a tax on the rich won’t raise enough income, I think: why can’t we just plug these numbers into a computer and get an answer?  When I hear teabaggers saying we can’t afford universal health insurance, and liberals (I am a liberal, in case anyone reading this didn’t know) saying we can’t afford to be without it, I think “we can’t both be right.”  Likewise with the death penalty, and legalization of marijuana.

There are moral arguments to be made, of course, but the economic impact should be totally measurable.  Maybe not 100%, because people and the future are unpredictable things, but we could come close, and the computers will keep on improving until they can predict our patterns of consumption and spending, near enough as never mind.

So, maybe we should just start leaving the numbers stuff up to the computers and get down to the debate on what kind of world we want to live in.  I, for one, would propose a world without pollution, starvation, poverty, war and crime.  I wish I could be certain I was in the majority.

p.s. I’d like legal marijuana, too.