I don’t usually comment on the xkcd web comic, as just about everyone reads it already, but this week’s I completely agree with.
After seeing Office Space with z3rb back in February, he said that Idiocracy (made by the same people or director or something) was also good. I watched it, and he was wrong. It was shit. The whole film was stupid.
As the cartoons discusses, the average IQ of the population is not going to decline, the average person’s IQ will always be 100 because that is how IQ is defined. I think. So no matter whether people more or less clever, their IQs will stay the same. But issues of IQ aside, people aren’t going to give up on cleverness. It’s built into our species, a desire to learn and know things. People learn more today because we have the technology to do so easily, and in the future we’ll have even more time to do so.
I also agree with the cartoon’s title:
People aren’t going to change, for better or for worse. Technology’s going to be so cool. All in all, the future will be okay! Except climate; we fucked that one up.
Technology will be so cool, and so will the future. We think it’s alright being alive at this time, but imagine what’s still to come. Technology helps people to learn and be better informed, it’s not going to lead to societal ‘decline’. It will free people from having to work so hard and let us be better people.
But bullshit aside, there was another problem with the film: it just wasn’t funny. That’s why it failed ((And why TNG wins.)).
Wolf, what do you think of this one.
Due to medical advances are we as a race breeding an inferior future?
Well, if we were deliberately selecting the people who could reproduce, and those were the best human specimens, then it’s quite probable that we would have a better human race than we do – better eyesight etc. But I don’t think it’s a good idea morally to do that.
That wasn’t my point. The point was, are medical advances leading to the breeding an inferior human race? As in people who would have died due to an illness/deficiency are living to reproduce thus diluting the gene pool of what will have survived without outside influence.
On another slightly related note: I guess selective breeding happens naturally; fit (this could mean many things, not just physical fitness) and healthy people tend to mate with similar and the unwashed masses tend to stick with the unwashed massed. Maybe we are unknowingly breeding a 2nd class humanity.
No.