Rapid Change: The Technological Meteor Causing Craziness
September 6, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
The mantra “Move fast and break things” creates opportunities for entrepreneurs and mental health professionals. “Eminent Scientist Richard Dawkins Reveals Fascinating Theory Behind West’s Mental Health Crisis” quotes Dr. Dawkins:
‘Certainly, the rate at which we are evolving genetically is miniscule compared to the rate at which we are evolving non-genetically, culturally,’ Dawkins told the hosts of the TRIGGERnometry podcast. ‘And much of the mental illness that afflicts people may be because we are in a constantly changing unpredictable environment,’ the biologist added, ‘in a way that our ancestors were not.’
Thanks, Microsoft Copilot. Is that a Windows Phone doing the flame out thing?
The write up reports:
Dawkins expressed more direct concerns with other aspects of human technology’s impact on evolution: climate change and basic self-reliance in the face of a new Dark Age. ‘The internet is a huge change, it’s gigantic change,’ he noted. ‘We’ve become adapted to it with astonishing rapidity.’ ‘if we lost electricity, if we suddenly lost the technology we’re used to,’ Dawkins worried, humanity might not be able to eve ‘begin’ to adapt in time, without great social upheaval and death… ‘Man-made extinction,’ he said, ‘it’s just as bad as the others. I think it’s tragic.’
There you go, death.
I know that brilliant people often speak carefully. Experts take time to develop their knowledge base and put words together that make complex ideas easy to understand.
From my redoubt in rural Kentucky, I have watched the panoply of events parading across my computer monitor. Among the notable moments were:
- Images from US cities showing homeless people slumped over either scrolling on their mobile phones or from the impact of certain compounds on their body
- Young people looting stores and noting similar items offered for sale on Craigslist.com-type sites
- Graphs of US academic performance illustrating the winners and losers of educational achievement tests
- The number of people driving around at times I associated with being in an office at “work” when I was younger
- Advertisements for prescription drugs with peculiar names and high-resolution images of people with smiles and contented lives but for the unnamed disease plaguing the otherwise cheerful folk.
What are the links between these unrelated situations and online access? I think I have a reasonably good idea. Why have experts, parents, and others required decades to figure out that flows of information are similar to sand-blasting systems. Provide electronic information to an organization, and it begins to decompose. The “bonds” which hold the people, processes, and products together are weakened. Then some break. Pump electronic information into younger people. They begin to come apart too. Give college students a tool to write their essays. Like lemmings, many take the AI solution and watch TikToks.
I am pleased that Dr. Dawkins has identified a problem. Now what’s the fix? The digital meteor has collided with human civilization. Can the dinosaurs be revivified?
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2024
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