Techno tower Babel
Technology's Precarious Balance and the Temptation to Play God:
I don’t fear AI and neither should you. I’m aware of the potential dangers, but I don’t believe we will ever see Skynet. For all its potential AI will be just another brick in the technological wall that is bound to collapse all around us.
While technology has done much to improve our lives. It is no secret that it has caused immeasurable damage. Technology has eroded our attention spans by giving us everything on demand. It has made us fatter by allowing us to produce enormous amounts of cheap low-quality food while reducing the need for physical activity, and it is now becoming increasingly obvious that is making us dumber. Every new technology atrophies the senses and removes us from the natural world, and man presses on ever playing God and never asking if he should only if he can.
Declining IQ Rate and the Fall of Intellectual Capacities:
In the twilight of our age, concerns have been raised regarding the declining average IQ observed in certain regions. Various factors, including environmental changes, educational deficiencies, and societal influences, have been implicated in this decline. Such diminishing intellectual capacities will lead to reduced problem-solving abilities, impaired critical thinking skills, and hindered innovation. These consequences, in turn, make sustaining and advancing complex technologies near impossible.
The push button app-driven modern technologically dependent society we live in requires an ever-increasingly complex system to maintain it. Yet that same technology has a negative effect on the overall health and intelligence of the population. Young people are losing the ability to write, read, and cook, in addition to many other necessary life skills. We have long since lost the ability to provide for ourselves, even the most basic necessities are a mystery in their origin to the younger generation. Few people today can garden, hunt, or produce clothing, they are simply reliant on the current system to provide all that they need.
The rebuttal to the above critique is something to the effect of “We don’t need to do those things we have technology”. While this is a fair point it rests on the presupposition that technology will be with us in perpetuity. There will be no back slide just an ever-growing technological complexity. Any basic study of history would refute this claim. Technologies have been lost and rediscovered as civilizations come and go. Nothing is permanent and to assume is in all likely hood fatal.
The history of human civilization is not the story of eternal progress but rather an ebb and flow, where civilizations rise and fall. As tiresome as the comparison of our current civilization to Rome is, it has become cliche because it fits so well. When Rome finally collapsed, Europe went into the dark ages, followed by the middle ages, then on to the Renaissance eventually soring back to the heights of Rome. So one would assume that if the United States were to collapse we would see a similar situation play out however, our collapse would be catastrophic.
When Rome finally succumbed to its fate the population that remained had the basic skills necessary to provide for themselves and their communities. The same cannot be said for a large swath of the world today. Our overreliance on technology has left us dependent, and like a junkie, the withdrawals could be fatal.
We are just now beginning to see the fruits of our labor. IQ levels have been dropping for some time and at their current trajectory the average IQ could drop as low as 85 by the end of this century1. That is a number far below what is necessary to maintain such a complex network of systems that our society has become reliant on. Even if you believe that we can create automated systems capable of self-regulation those systems have to be maintained by somebody and those people are going to become increasingly rare.
With all of this in mind, I am drawn back as I so often am to the Bible. The Tower of Babel narrative, found in the Book of Genesis, tells the tale of a civilization driven by hubris to construct a tower that would reach the heavens. Driven by their thirst for acclaim and fearful of dispersion, they sought to rival the divine. However, their arrogance and aspiration to play God invited divine intervention, resulting in the confusion of languages and the ultimate collapse of their grandiose project.
Here we emphasize the perils of human pride and the dire consequences of overstepping our boundaries without the necessary wisdom and reverence for the divine. As man uses technology to play God, God makes man too stupid to maintain his creation, and in truly divine comedic nature, it is man’s tools that will drag him back to earth, technology will become incomprehensible, a foreign tongue to fresh ears.
We must embrace humility, recognize our limited nature, and relinquish the desire to ascend to the heavens without due reverence for the divine order and in the meantime prepare our children with the skills to navigate the coming storm, for those that do will be the architects of the new.
-TJS
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/