A view of the future

Are we progressing as a society? Are we progressing as fast as we once were?

I want to touch upon those questions tonight and they are in part driven by the comment on the last post. Think about how smart the average person is and realize that half of the people out there are dumber than him. Or to put it another way: always remember when you are annoyed at people at the grocery store or the DMV that their vote counts just as much as yours.

I will start with my points on progress though. I find it amazing that in my grandparents’ lifetime they were able to witness the birth of powered flight with the Wright Brothers to man landing on the moon. That was a single lifetime, a little over sixty years. So what about in my lifetime, which began just shortly after the last moon landing? Uh, not much. We’ve sent out a few probes. We could argue that air travel is now more efficient though my time spent at the Philly airport would argue against that. We simply have not made that quantum leap in air travel. Nor have we in automobiles, manufacturing, food production and a host of other fields. On some levels the world has changed little in forty years a statement that is rather unusual.

However, where the world has changed massively in forty years is in high tech and computers and everything built upon the transistor (thank you Prof. Bardeen.) What has changed is the internet and the speed of communication and the pure availability of information. I grew up with libraries and card catalogs and encyclopedias. Those are all fossils now. Just think how much mobile phones have changed the world. Remember trying to meet people in a public place in the days before they existed? Or using Discman and Walkmen to listen to music? Those are the areas that we have progressed.

So from a technology standpoint we are making progress in making things smaller but we still haven’t made what I would consider to be a quantum leap. We may have magnificent toys but society as a whole (and certainly the infrastructure supporting it) has remained the same. And depending on how you view the world’s oil and water reserves we may be closer to seeing a collapse of our infrastructure than the reinvention of it. But even the positive side with the growth of high tech has one huge disadvantage: its best qualities require a certain level of intelligence.

You can discuss cultural divides in a number of ways. It could be racial or cultural or financial or a host of other possibilities. In my mind the next great divide is going to be a combination of technology and intelligence. We are getting to the point where our tech is growing more expensive and more difficult to use and understand. Think about the challenge of hooking up a modern entertainment system versus an old television and stereo. It is a better product but even with an electrical engineering degree I find myself behind my TV with a flashlight trying to figure out where the wires go. Think about the fact that without the internet for preboarding going to the airport is a major hassle. Just think about the challenge a kid would have in school without access to Wikipedia when his classmates do. That is the divide and when you think about the level of education of that average person you begin to understand just how huge a divide it could be.

I still would like to think that I have a positive view on society. I believe in the better angels of our nature. But I worry greatly when people assume that science will save us all. Because while science can put a man on the moon it hasn’t sent one there in forty years. And even if it does save us it will only work if we can also understand it.