The Rat Race of the Future

Cathy Hull / NY Times

G. Pascal Zachary’s great thought piece in the Times from March, 2007 (“Is the Key to Creativity in Your Pillbox, or in Your PC?)’ caught my eye this week because it got the right answer in its false dichotomy—whether pharmaceuticals or the Internet in some future form will better be able to boost people’s smarts—and because it gets at the core problem in the debate over the nature of intelligence: Where does it actually come from?

Zachary, a journalism professor at Stanford, said pills might do more harm than good for someone wanting to boost her brains:

The real risk of performance enhancers is the problem of diminishing returns. Knowledge workers, powered by biochemical enhancers, may realize only too late that a favored enhancer masks a flaw in their intellectual approach to a problem. The creativity shortcut could actually place a person in a delusional state in which weak ideas are mistaken for strong ones.

But it gets better. Although he doesn’t quite say it here, Zachary must have understood that human intelligence can’t be purely biological, as a brain bolus might imply, but something to do with how humans interact with each other—specifically, how they communally share and parse information.

Proponents of mind-expanding electronic technologies, like [IT leader Mitchell] Kapor, argue that creativity is making new connections between diverse data and seeing fresh patterns in what others consider an old image. That’s exactly what computers do well.

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Now each of us, whenever we log onto the Internet, can amplify our own thoughts by making rapid connections to articles, reports and even books, images and films that not long ago would have taken a small army to assemble.

Zachary is not bullish on the technology that would make the Internet make us that much smarter—that’s how he can salvage the non-controversy between drugs and digits in the article’s closing—but the reader should still come away with the idea that the most promising answer is that how ideas and minds are connected is more important than how individual brains are boosted. It’s an integral part of—and far beyond—nature-vs-nurture debate. Intelligence, or at least how I think most people imagine smarts, is both a matter of processing speed and the nature of novel ideas: both require parallel streams of thought that come together in new ways to solve all kinds of problems and create all kinds of new experiences.

I might be giving Zachary too much credit in this one article, but the implications are profound nonetheless. If intelligence or smarts have something to do with our success in life, and intelligence has something to do with how ideas connect to each other, then both technological and social connectivity are important to those who want a more equitable human society.

This article, by Gerry Shih in today’s Times, got me thinking about it. The article describes how American college students and recent graduates are getting paid less and less for internships, which are becoming more and more important to professional success, and some wealthier students are even paying to get them.

Social connectivity has always been important, but mostly because of how it teaches people to navigate social pathways to power and influence. But soon, social connectivity might have more to do with coming into contact with and properly understanding new ideas, which themselves become more important to understand and use in the marketplace. They don’t even have to be important or profound ideas. These new thoughts will be the ones that allow people to understand how the market for both ideas and physical products is flowing and what elites (yes, they’ll still exist in the future) will look for in both employees and new ways of doing things.

And then there’s that world brain. While presumably everyone will have access to it in that future time when we all wear silver jump suits and have our robot attendants secretly plotting to overthrow humanity, the entirety of the world’s knowledge and information won’t be equally accessible. Not only is it because we need an education (not necessarily a formal one) to understand our history, our government, and science, just like we will need some form of constant initiation to understand how the world’s knowledge and information are changing and how they’re being used by elites.

So the Internet won’t be the great equalizer for long. The rat race will live on. End.