The only smart people left are true artists, people like Bill Gates, and serial killers.
Are you one of the above?
It is common knowledge that as we get older, we tend to become smarter. However, as the world is becoming more complicated and machines and soft wares are becoming smarter, many people believed that our society as a whole is getting dumber. While searching for more info on wordpress, I stumbled upon a blog in which the author expresses his astonishment about how we are actually dumber than we think, to the point that we need to be told to avoid hurting ourselves or making ourselves look foolish. He points out examples of himself needing to be told by the label on a bottle of drain cleaner that “Harmful If Swallowed”. Or whenever we buy any product that gets plugged into an electrical outlet, it always comes with an instruction booklet that devotes to demonstrating various ways that we might be injured by the product.
This blog sort of rang a bell in my head. I don’t think we all are necessarily getting dumber or smarter, but rather, we are getting progressively lazier. Has the world become so reliant on technology that people are now lacking the ability to think? Are stuff like Google making us stupid? It is extremely contradictory on my part, as I’m actually Google-ing “world getting dumber” while typing this. More incredibly, Google brings me 1,240,000 results in the time span of 0.16 seconds. Long before machines and technologies were created, people used their only minds and brains to do anything and everything in their lives. They learned from what they saw/heard/tasted. From there onwards, they developed a pattern to make life easier by inventing stuffs, one after another. Maybe when it comes to creativity, our ancestors are on another level. Nowadays, people think the same, act the same and have the same values. Who dare to think out of the box and act differently, other than true artists, serial killers, and people like Bill Gates?
This lack of capacity to think is significantly attributed to our overdependence on technology. Yes, there are the technicians, engineers, scientists… who keep all of our high-tech toys run smoothly. However, people in general might be getting lazier and more stupid at an alarming rate.
What are the solutions to these? How can we make ourselves smarter and less dependent on technology? Since Jordi made us think of a proposal, I did try my best. Yet, I have to admit that my reasoning and creativity level is no better general people; and thus, I could come up with as many as two solutions. The first one, as lame as it is, is to eliminate all traces technology in our life. The more we keep things simple, the more brain workouts we will have, and the better life we will live. How many of us know how to survive without a cell phone, computer, electricity, or even grocery store? What would happen of a catastrophe came? I’d say more than half of the world population could not survive without electricity and food.
Another solution that my poor brain could come up with is that instead of eliminating technology completely, we should counteract the dumbing down of our society by making smart people have more kids and prohibiting or restricting dumb people from having kids. This way, in the future, even if people keep relying on technology and machines more and more, they can still utilize them in an intelligent way.
That’s all I have. So what do you think?
Business Government & Society III 
Restrict dumb people from having kids is my vote. Referring back to the overpopulation posts, our world needs to decrease, or at least maintain the current population. Our world is becoming increasingly overcrowded with people who barely survive. It is typically not their fault that they struggle, so it is hard to draw the line of who deserves to reproduce and who doesn’t. It isn’t the most ethical way of solving our overpopulation problem, but restricting the less intelligent people from having kids will lead us in a better direction.
I think there is a notion that smart people are more successful, have bigger ambitions and therefore, plan things out more. They also have better access to birth control and protection. Less intelligent people, on the other hand, tend to play the system for everything they can, for example, good stamps, cash assistance… They are also less successful, more likely to have low income, thus, less likely to be able to afford birth control. If this keeps happening, the welfare system will kept being taken advantage of, and these people will keep depending on the government to support them. Like you said, I agree that this is definitely not the most ethical way to deal with overpopulation, but the economy is going to benefit a lot more if we can find a way to restrict them from reproducing.
I think the blog about the labels is very interesting. I understand that many of those labels are there for legal issues but after many years, people have started relying on the labels completely.