[…] Some are quite prosaic, like the welter of new gadgets that try to “nudge” us into better behavior. In his new book To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov casts a skeptical eye on this stuff. He tells me about a recent example he’s seen: A smart fork that monitors how much you’re eating and warns you if you’re overdoing it.

Fun and useful, you might argue. But for Morozov, tools like the fork reduce your incentive to think about how you’re eating, and the deeper political questions of why today’s food ecosystem is so enfattening. “Instead of regulating the food industry to make food healthier,” Morozov says, “we’re giving people smart forks.”

Or as Evan Selinger, a philosopher at Rochester Institute of Technology, puts it, tools that make hard things easy can make us less likely to tolerate things that are hard. Outsourcing our self-control to “digital willpower” has consequences: Use Siri constantly to get instant information and you can erode your ability to be patient in the face of incomplete answers, a crucial civic virtue.

[…]

And this, really, is the core of the question here: Efficiency isn’t always a good thing. Tech lets us do things more easily. But this can mean doing them less reflectively too.

We’re not going to throw out all technology, nor should we. Efficiency isn’t always bad. But Morozov suggests that sometimes tools should do the opposite—they should introduce friction. For example, new parking meters reset when you drive away, so another driver can’t draft off of any remaining time. The city makes more money, obviously, but that design also compels your behavior. What if a “smart” meter instead offered you a choice: Gift remaining time to the next driver or to the city? This would foreground the tiny moral trade-offs of daily life—city versus citizen.

Or consider the Caterpillar, a prototype power strip created by German designers that detects when a plugged-in device is in standby mode. Instead of turning off the device—a traditional efficiency move—the Caterpillar leaves it on, but starts writhing. The point is to draw your attention to your power usage, to force you to turn it off yourself and meditate on why you’re using so much.

These are kind of crazy, of course. They’re not tools that solve problems. They’re tools to make you think about problems—which is precisely the point.

Ref: How Relying on Algorithms and Bots Can Be Really, Really Dangerous – Wired

Dr. Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford, has published a study that he conducted to try and identify the progression of modern man’s intelligence. As it turns out, however, Dr. Crabtree’s research led him to believe that the collective mind of mankind has been on more or a less a downhill trajectory for quite some time.

According to his research, published in two parts starting with last year’s ‘Our fragile intellect. Part I,’ Dr. Crabtree thinks unavoidable changes in the genetic make-up coupled with modern technological advances has left humans, well, kind of stupid. He has recently published his follow-up analysis, and in it explains that of the roughly 5,000 genes he considered the basis for human intelligence, a number of mutations over the years has forced modern man to be only a portion as bright as his ancestors.

“New developments in genetics, anthropology and neurobiology predict that a very large number of genes underlie our intellectual and emotional abilities, making these abilities genetically surprisingly fragile,” he writes in part one of his research. “Analysis of human mutation rates and the number of genes required for human intellectual and emotional fitness indicates that we are almost certainly losing these abilities,” he adds in his latest report.

From there, the doctor goes on to explain that general mutations over the last few thousand years have left mankind increasingly unable to cope with certain situations that perhaps our ancestors would be more adapted to.

“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a clear-sighted view of important issues. Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2000–6000 years ago. The basis for my wager comes from new developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology that make a clear prediction that our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile.”

According to the doctor, humans were at their most intelligent when “every individual was exposed to nature’s raw selective mechanisms on a daily basis.” Under those conditions, adaption, he argued, was much more of a matter than fight or flight. Rather, says the scientists, it was a sink or swim situation for generations upon generations.

“We, as a species, are surprisingly intellectually fragile and perhaps reached a peak 2,000 to 6,000 years ago,” he writes. “If selection is only slightly relaxed, one would still conclude that nearly all of us are compromised compared to our ancient ancestors of 3,000 to 6,000 years ago.”

Ref: Our Fragile Intellect – Stanford
Ref: Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist – RT