Technology and Know Nothing-ism Conspire To Make America Dumber. That Is Not A Good Thing.

For my entire lifetime the "controversy" surrounding Darwin's theories on the evolution of a species being driven by biological adaptation of a species to constantly changing environments has bewildered me.  As far as I comprehend that certain sub-cultures, particularly those of conservative religious fundamentalists, reject evolution from what I can only discern as a perceived threat to religious dogma, I don't understand how those attitudes persist, even though it seems to me that understanding the mechanism of an evolutionary process in no way disproves a guiding hand if that's what they are worried about.  I, for one, can not diffinitively discern the hand of God from random chance.  What is alarming me now is how this rejection of knowledge is metastasizing into the wider culture.  Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, you just didn't see major figures on credible news and opinion media endorsing the rejection of knowledge and science as Glenn Beck did the other day.  The impact of Beck's endorsement of Know Nothing rejection of evolution is not just in undermining the undermining of future generations ability to compete in the scientific advancements required to keep the United States competitive in the information technology world, (DNA is simply molecularly encoded information.)  it undermines our future ability to compete on all scientific fronts.  The goal of this growing power in our society aims not educational excellence, but rather requiring educational adherence to sub-cultural dogma.  What was the proclaimed basis for Beck's rejection of science?  The fact that he has never seen a half-man half-ape.  That's right folks.

"I think that's ridiculous. I haven't seen a half-monkey, half-person yet. Did evolution just stop? There's no other species that is developing into half-human?"

Blogger Steve Bennen at the Washington Monthly looked back today at past comments of President Obama regarding how the rest of the world looks at the importance of education.

This got me thinking about a story President Obama told about a year ago, after he returned from a trip to Asia. He shared an anecdote about a luncheon he attended with the president of South Korea.

"I was interested in education policy -- they've grown enormously over the last 40 years," Obama said. "And I asked him, 'What are the biggest challenges in your education policy?' He said, 'The biggest challenge that I have is that my parents are too demanding.' He said, 'Even if somebody is dirt poor, they are insisting that their kids are getting the best education.' He said, 'I've had to import thousands of foreign teachers because they're all insisting that Korean children have to learn English in elementary school.' That was the biggest education challenge that he had, was an insistence, a demand from parents for excellence in the schools.

"And the same thing was true when I went to China. I was talking to the mayor of Shanghai, and I asked him about how he was doing recruiting teachers, given that they've got 25 million people in this one city. He said, 'We don't have problems recruiting teachers because teaching is so revered and the pay scales for teachers are actually comparable to doctors and other professions. '

"That gives you a sense of what's happening around the world. There is a hunger for knowledge, an insistence on excellence, a reverence for science and math and technology and learning. That used to be what we were about."

Which brings me to speculate on whether or not there is some mathematical curve the collective intelligence of a society moves on which might correlate with that societies rise and fall on other measures.  Would it be a leading indicator or a trailing one?  Is it driven by a Poverty of Affluence, or is the growing energy of the Know Nothing crowd driven by other factors, such as a growing unease with the rapid pace of technology?  The differences are stark when you consider that China has more english speaking engineers and scientists graduating from their universities than we have graduating in the United States, especially when you factor in the large percentage of foreign born students we have graduating at post graduate levels from American Universities.  What ever the variables at work it seems as if much of the world is on the upward slope of the curve while we seem to be on the downward slope.

Speaking of the rapid pace of technology, a recent article from MIT's Technology Review, The Ultimate Persuasion Device, speculated on the negative impact on our collective intelligence by the evolution of smart phones into a super iPhone social networking and social information device will have on the near future.

TR: In your book, America is a post-literate society and we lost the ability to interact directly with one another. Did technology lead us to this point? 

GS: In the book there are many culprits. I think technology can be construed as one culprit but I think the main culprit is the fact that we are getting dumber. Whether technology enables this or not is an open question. But compared, relative to other countries in the world, we are constantly on the way down in terms of our scores in a wide variety of things.

This may not be so evident obviously at MIT because the whole world comes to the Institute to get educated, but in terms of primary education, things are really bad.

What's interesting is one study that the Times recently published about-- children's vocabularies are shrinking because their parents are constantly texting and typing away and they don't have enough time to just communicate to the child.

So that's something that really intrigued me and felt like it was already part of this world.

Maybe just as technology creates a problem, it may also create a solution.  Perhaps the solution will be dolls running artificial intelligence programs and faces with the capacity for expressing emotion which take over the role of teaching children to communicate and read.  Whatever the solution, be it cultural or be it technological, we need it now, not later.

Weekly Address: Solar Power and Clean Energy Economy

We have a stark choice.  Policies which incentivize the development of new energy technologies and the industries and jobs they create or drilling, further deregulation and tax breaks for the oil industry.  Each path leads to it's own particular future.  The election in the fall matters.

I Have A Nightmare

I just don't get it. When I wonder about how the conservative group mind has so much mis-information floating around in it, I have to remember the source of the mis-information.  As Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly noted on Beck's Restore America 2010 rally held at the Lincoln Memorial:

The folks who gathered in D.C. today were awfully excited about something. The fact that it's not altogether obvious what that might be probably isn't a good sign.

Hello Iris. Welcome To The Future.

A world where everyone knows your name may be just around the corner.  Within the next decade the time may com when employers, hospitals, stores and banks, not to mention law enforcement, will know your identity as soon as you walk through their doors.  They will read it in your eye.  Or in your iris to be more specific.

Austin Carr of the Fast Company website reports that an american biometrics research firm, Global Rainmakers Inc., and the city of Leon, Mexico plan to implement the first city wide biometrics identification system, first for law enforcement and later followed by the release of commercial applications.

"In the future, whether it's entering your home, opening your car, entering your workspace, getting a pharmacy prescription refilled, or having your medical records pulled up, everything will come off that unique key that is your iris," says Jeff Carter, CDO of Global Rainmakers. Before coming to GRI, Carter headed a think tank partnership between Bank of America, Harvard, and MIT. "Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected [to the iris system] within the next 10 years," he says.

Like all new technology, adoption of this tech will start off slow.  Leon is just one city after all.  But notice the rate of exponential growth Mr. Carter suggests when he says that "every person, place and thing" will be connected to a central system within the next 10 years.

The eye scan technology, from the description provided by Mr. Carr of his experience at GRI's research facilities in New York, NY,  is going to revolutionize life as we know it.  It will be able to identify the passengers in vehicles as they travel down the highway.  It will be able to identify convicted shoplifters, thieves, robbers, even hot check writers, as they pass through a stores doorway.  Law enforcement officers will need only to have a person they have stopped look at a small hand held scanner to quickly know the identity of the person they have stopped.  The technology may even serve as the lock on your door.

The roll out of the Iris Scan system for the city of Leon is already underway according to Carr.

"GRI's scanning devices are currently shipping to the city, where integration will begin with law enforcement facilities, security check-points, police stations, and detention areas. This first phase will cost less than $5 million. Phase II, which will roll out in the next three years, will focus more on commercial enterprises. Scanners will be placed in mass transit, medical centers and banks, among other public and private locations.

The devices range from large-scale scanners like the Hbox (shown in the airport-security prototype above), which can snap up to 50 people per minute in motion, to smaller scanners like the EyeSwipe and EyeSwipe Mini, which can capture the irises of between 15 to 30 people per minute. "

I think it's going to be hard not to argue that we are headed, as Carr's frequent reference's to Orwell's novel 1984 implies, towards a world where the government, and anyone else with access to the Iris system data base, has the capacity to track each person through their everyday life using billions of sensors and scanners which are predicted to become ubiquitous in our public and private lives. Theoretically opting into the system will be voluntary, but the disincentives for choosing not to opt-in are large. As Carr notes, refusing to opt-in potentially makes it more likely to make you an object of suspicion or investigation.

"There's a lot of convenience to this--you'll have nothing to carry except your eyes," says Carter, claiming that consumers will no longer be carded at bars and liquor stores. And he has a warning for those thinking of opting out: "When you get masses of people opting-in, opting out does not help. Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system. We believe everyone will opt-in."

I don't know about Iris, but I'm not all that comfortable with the thought of Big Brother moving in.

Shift Happens.

The challenge, created by the present exponential acceleration in technology, facing today's educators is enormous. This video, titled Did you know? Shift Happens 2.0 is four years old now. It is important to remember that some technologies and trends have doubled in speed, size or efficiency two or three times since this video was first made. Smart phones like the iPhone and the Android didn't exist.  Since then Facebook, which was hardly on the radar screen in 2006 has grown to over 500,000,000 users. Created by Scott McLeod and Karl Fisch for a group of 150 high school educators, it was intended to illustrate a future of technology moving into hyper drive, and the difficulties of preparing students for that 21st century world.



 Did you know? Shift Happens 2.0 is another of the videos highlighted in the Singularity Hub's list of 12 videos that will help you love the future.

Futuristic Short: Doll Face

Created by Andy Huang, Doll Face is thought provoking and a bit unsettling. The video was part of a list of 12 videos that will help you love the future put together at the Singularity Hub website.

When A Group Mind Goes Schizophrenic

The more I watch the Tea Party/Far Right drag the conservative movement in our Republic to the right, the more I have I have to wonder if the alternative universe many modern right wing conservatives describe when they describe the motivations and actions of the President and democrats, doesn't represent a sort of group mind schizophrenia.  The Mayo Clinic describes the positive symptoms of schizophrenia:

Delusions. These beliefs are not based in reality and usually involve misinterpretation of perception or experience. They are the most common of schizophrenic symptoms.

Hallucinations. These usually involve seeing or hearing things that don't exist, although hallucinations can be in any of the senses. Hearing voices is the most common hallucination among people with schizophrenia.

Thought disorder. Difficulty speaking and organizing thoughts may result in stopping speech midsentence or putting together meaningless words, sometimes known as "word salad."

Disorganized behavior. This may show in a number of ways, ranging from childlike silliness to unpredictable agitation.

 All of these symptoms, to one degree or another, would characterize what I perceive coming from right wing politicians and opinion managers like the former half term governor, Sarah Palin, Fox "News" personality, Glen Beck, Minnesota Congresswoman, Barbara Bachman, or Nevada Senate candidate, Sharon Angle.

Among the delusions the far right group mind embraces are:

The delusion and irrational fear that Barack Obama represents the interests of lazy blacks who want to raise taxes and steal white peoples America so they don't have to work.

The irrational fear that Obama and Democrats want to put white conservatives in concentration camps.

The irrational fear that Obama, the democrats, and even false Republicans, supports terrorists who want to destroy America.

The irrational delusion that Obama is not really an American.

The delusion that Obama and the democrats are engaged in nationalization of the Auto Industry, Wall Street and the Healthcare industry.

The delusional fear that Obama and democrats want to deny old people healthcare using death panels.

The irrational fear that Obama and democrats use public education to indoctrinate  and re-educate children to hate God and worship "big government" as God,

The irrational delusion that Obama and not Bush is the reason for the huge deficit we have today and that Obama, and not Bush, signed the Wall Street Bailout into law.

In short, the Tea Party/ Far Right, as a group, seems to see things that don't exist, embrace beliefs that are not based in reality, show unpredictable agitation over imagined conspiracies against them,  and engage in rambling "word salad" defenses of their delusional beliefs when pressed to explain them.  Is it time to come out and say it..., the conservative group mind is going schizophrenic, perceiving hostility and threat where none exist, finding reality increasingly confusing and retreating into a social isolation of it's own self reinforcing media messages?