Are We Really Getting Smarter Or Dumber?

Are We Really Getting Smarter Or Dumber?

Are We Really Getting Smarter Or Dumber?

When I was kid at school back in the seventies we weren't allowed to use calculators on the assumption that reliance on them would make us dumber in math skills. When I look back now I think we were already pretty dumb in math anyway: it took us a long time to do things like long division using a routine method that we had memorized only because the teacher had ruthlessly rammed it through our heads enough time. We were supposed to know the multiplication table on sight lickety split, but only a rare kid did, and we would think she was an Einstein or something.

The fact is, humans are dumb at math and always will be. That is precisely why many ages ago the Chinese invented the abacus and why we in the computer age came up with one of the first truly useful gadgets- the pocket calculator.

The fact that we come up with tools to perform tasks that are cumbersome and slow for us shows that we are smart and getting smarter all the time. Honestly, if computers disappeared completely from the earth tomorrow, don't you think we'd learn long division again in no time? We should be grateful then that we won't have to but in secure in knowing that we could.

People tend to confuse recreation with stupidity. Sure, we can spend lots of time on inane games and just messing around on the Internet with our computers. Even though it costs an arm and a leg, we can have trivial conversations with friends on our cell phone. But humans are also competitive by nature. We will become, as a species, more and more skilled at computers and will achieve amazing results. Computers are forcing us to understand more and think more abstractly. We are getting smarter, not dumber.

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