Technology: Fattening Us for the Slaughter

JW,

To see yet another reason why the terrorists hate us, spend an afternoon jogging the trails alongside the river where I live. In addition to the staggering obesity, the lack of basic movement skills, and the tendency of middle-aged men to go shirtless (while walking), you're likely to encounter a new kind of American parent: the To-Hell-With-Conventional-Wisdom-My-Kid-Will-Only-Shut-Up-When-He's-Watching-Television guy. This new breed, buoyed by technological advances that will soon have flatscreens on plies of toilet paper, has pretty much given up on interaction. Reading with their children? Not bloody likely! Helping with homework? I think not. Attaching a television monitor and earphones to their six-year-old's stroller so he'll be quiet long enough for Mom and Dad to squeeze in a walk? Hell yes!

I'm bringing this up, by the way, because it's a great example of a sub-law of the Law of Unintended Consequences--the Law That Each New Convenience Makes Us Slightly Stupider. Consider, for example, the Internet, which, according to studies, is already shaping [read: erasing] the human capacity for memory. Or the GPS device, whose achievements include leading an overconfident driver into a lake, guiding a demolition crew to the wrong house, and directing drivers to turn onto train tracks. Ten years from now, when the television-in-the-stroller generation heads to the workforce, we can pretty much forget about an honest day's work. They literally won't have the capacity to think.

What they will have, however, is the perfect set of skills to vote Democratic: sloth, an overreliance on media (or the media), and an inability to imagine themselves in any but their current circumstances. Just as the almost total domestication of this country--the end of "westering," as Steinbeck called it--took our sense of adventure, just as the welfare state took our self-sufficiency, so our obsession with glowing rectangles will take our intellects. At the rate they're going, the next generation will be even lazier and stupider than ours. And friend, that's saying something.

-GM

GM,

I've always thought that many companies need to hire contract workers for oversight rather than actually having a department for it. Why? Because the stupidity that is built in to some of the world's most amazing technology can only be explained by employees' inability to take an outsider's perspective. Take, for instance, the Garmin GPS that my company provides for me when I'm on the road. It's a true delight roughly 60 percent of the time. The other 40 percent of the time I need it, it can't pick up a satellite signal because of clouds, can't find a business or the address it's been located at for 20 years, leads me to a vacant lot about a mile away from my true desination, or tells me to turn right on "Hamric Doctor."

Think about all that goes into the production of a high-end (Garmin is supposedly one of the best brands) GPS. The technology is beyond my imagination. Garmin spent $206 million on research and development last year. The least they've ever spent in a year is $64 million in 2004. Apparently, though, in whatever year they made mine, their research fell just short of discovering that "Dr," in English-speaking countries with roads, is short for "Drive." Should I remind you this is a GPS--a device whose sole function is to guide people along roads?! Yet somehow no one caught the mistake. You should watch the movie Idiocracy. On second thought, it was dreadful, but it had a novel concept, one I've often envisioned. The world becomes amazingly stupid and ignorant because all the brilliant technology leads to a complete lack of mental activity. Again, don't watch it, please--unless you think Luke Wilson and Dax Shepard can make you laugh while actually trying to do so.

-JW