It All Falls Apart

It comes as no surprise to me that the world is a relatively stupid place where resources, physical and intellectual, are wasted on a daily basis. I still found bits of the WSJ's "The Latest Buzz on . . . Phone Culture" piece more than disturbing. Let me set the stage by saying that I watched the movie Idiocracy last night. In this film, Mike Judge gives a view of the future of the country as a dystopian society dominated by total and utter dumbassery thanks to the trend of the moron stock breeding like rabbits while the intelligent population fails to reproduce.

Narrator: As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.

Are we really headed in a direction that could result in humanity resorting to soundbites and advertising slogans for language? Let's start with the latest craze in Japan, more virtual experiences . . . you can now have virtual boy/girlfriends that "live" on your electronic device of choice and pop up at intervals to tell you how great you are. Even better, you can "run" a virtual version of the Tokyo Marathon . . . so the things you "can't do in the real world, you can do vicariously through avatars," except that with a few exceptions here or there, everybody could run in the real world. Along the same line of thought, Woodway is coming out with the EcoMill treadmill, which thanks to superior technology allows people to workout "using zero electricity". I haven't done the math yet, but compare the carbon footprint of manufacturing such a machine and shipping it to the end user with the carbon footprint of stepping outside and running on a revolutionary new surface called "the ground" . . . I'm just saying . . .

I am not an opponent of technological innovation, but it seems like resources could be used a little bit more intelligently. I understand where you see seemingly stupid decisions being made there is often a reason behind it and that reason is most often money. Maybe we are destined to have the great scientific minds of the future focus on the critical issues like hair loss and erectile dysfunction although if we can reduce the human experience to an infinite set of virtual experiences does it really matter? I have been pondering a new career and the idea just came to me, I could focus on liability issues of virtual experience because you know people are still going to sue people or should that be "people" . . .