Not accelerating machine intelligence, but decelerating human intelligence

I worry that the chronic scarcity of time of our age is pushing too many decision makers to take decisions having heard only very superficial arguments. The “elevator pitch” has become common even in academia. A meeting that lasts more than 30 minutes is a rarity (in fact, a luxury from the point of view of the most powerful, and therefore busiest, executives). You can’t get anybody’s attention for more than 20 minutes, but some issues cannot be fully understood in 20 minutes; and some great scientists are not as good at rhetorical speech as they are at their science, which means that they may lose a 20-minute argument even if they are 100% right. Too many discussions are downgraded because they take place by texting on smartphones, whose tiny keyboards discourage elaborate messages. Twitter’s 140-character posts are emblematic of the shrinking attention span. I am not afraid of the human race losing control of its machines as much as I am afraid that the human race will self-destroy because of the limitations of the “elevator pitch” and of the “tweet”; because of the chronic inability by decision makers, as well as by the general public, to fully understand an issue. (Incidentally, we have fewer and fewer investigative reporters in news organizations for the same reason, i.e. the reduced attention span of the readers/viewers, with the result that the reliability of news media is constantly declining).

It has become impossible to properly organize a hiking trip because the participants, accustomed to tweets and texting, will only read the first few lines of a lengthy email; but, if you didn’t prepare properly, you might get into serious trouble on a big mountain, perhaps even die. Now multiply this concept a few billion times to get the dimension of humanity’s major problems, and you should understand why the last of my concerns is that machines may become too intelligent and the first of my concerns is that humans might become too dumb.

As I type this sentence, Elon Musk and others are worried that machines may get so smart that they will start building smarter machines; instead, i am worried that people’s attention span is becoming so short that it will soon be impossible to explain the consequences of a short attention span. I don’t see an acceleration in what machines can do, but I do see a deceleration in human attention (if not in human intelligence in general).

More: http://www.scaruffi.com/singular