My all-boys high school offered an after-school activity called “computer club.”
The guys who joined were mostly pasty-faced, squishy fellows who wore pocket protectors to keep pens from staining their white button-downs. If you saw them approach a cute girl at a school dance, she would look sidewards and say, “Um, I have to get a drink of water.”
These guys spent hours in a dim room typing code into a keyboard attached to a telephone. After days of this, they would print out a giant piece of hinged computer paper marked with Xs and Os that – squinted at from a distance – said “MERRY CHRISTMAS.”
“Cool,” the rest of us would say before moving on to more exciting stuff like Latin translation.
Fast forward 40 years and we’re living in “Revenge of the Nerds 5: Nerds Take the White House.” Musk. Zuckerberg. Bezos. The guys you remember with tape on their eyeglasses are partying with their surgically enhanced wives at the presidential inauguration. They’re slashing government budgets and sending up rockets. God only knows what they’ll try next, but I’m scared.
I’m scared because I know these guys. They’re bright and endearing in a freakish way, but they should not be at the controls of anything more powerful than a laptop.
They’re not people people. They’re not dog people or even cat people. They inhabit the uncharted world between frat boys and the future, when our bodies become obsolete and our brains walk around in sneakers.
They have authority because our Grifter-in-Chief president respects nothing more than money and they’ve got piles of it due to our weakness for gadgetry.
Let’s be clear. Our species flew to the moon using mostly a slide rule. Fifty years later, we’re orbiting the moon and wanting big cred. We each carry a phone with all the world’s knowledge on it and we’re dumber than ever.
We take great pride in being the world’s most highly evolved species, but we’re still fascinated by shiny, new devices that spit out answers to trivia and we’re resistant to the ancient questions we’ve still not resolved.
Neil Armstrong fretted that his arrival at the moon didn’t seem to change much on Earth, including who we are and how we treat others. Wags back then said that all that came from the Apollo program was rocks, Velcro and orange-flavored breakfast drink.
I visited my high school a few years ago and chatted up my history teacher who, to his credit, was still teaching. As he was thoughtful, I asked him if he saw any difference between my generation of students and the current one.
Without hesitating he told me today’s students know more about more things than any of the kids who came before them, but they’re not so good at thinking about any one thing for very long.
His observation is worth fretting because human progress relies more on higher-level thinking, requiring prolonged thought, than it does on invention, the product of team tinkering. Appreciating that distinction is critical for measuring our success as a species.
In their use of the English language, the Brits use the word “clever” to describe the latter but “intelligent” for the former, an important difference. Einstein himself claimed to be no smarter than his peers but suggested that perhaps he spent more time thinking about physics problems than they did.
The nerds in power preside over technologies that mostly rely on – and profit from – impulse response and a short attention span, not on deep or sustained thought. Although impressive to the dimwit in the White House, they are the masters only of high-tech parlor tricks.
It’s dangerous for us to mistake them for great men.