<the world has gotten so complex that the relative need for people with a big grasp of ideas and solutions is greater than it has ever been and the percentage of such people hasn't grown>
On the contrary, the percentage of people with high intelligence has grown. See Flynn Effect, not to mention the fact of our big human skulls. Though if you mean the distribution of intelligence is the same old curve, stretched to the right, then that's true.
The smart ones make things more and more difficult for those at the left of the curve to cope. There is strong pressure and that makes evolutionary pressure too. Women select for success to breed. They rate intelligence well up their list of mating requirements.
The process has been underway for millennia [as shown by the fact of humans not being like chimps, for many thousands of years].
The process is really fast now, with 6 billion of us seething and breeding and failing and dying. Those who succeed, go on to have another go and see if their DNA and ideas can get through the next round.
The filtration process is rapid. Their challenges are increasing. As you say, a willing strong back is not enough for many these days.
6 billion!! That's huge. faculty.plattsburgh.edu It looks as though more have lived in the last 200 years than in all of history [though I haven't quite done the maths and don't have data on ealier life expectancies].
What will happen next, is that people will live where they have high speed cyberspace. Those who can use cyberspace will gravitate in a human crystallisation process to optical fibre nodes, forming, literally, a new form of brain and new form of humanity = smarter and symbiotic with It, like mitochondria tucked into cells.
When we bought our last house, number one on my list of requirements was fast cyberspace.
Now I need an upgrade from ADSL. Where's the fast, free, fibre? Japan, USA, Korea, Ireland, etc...
The fibre won't come to me. I have to go to it. Mohammed went to the mountain.
Hey! You can't tell me Google doesn't have incipient if not actual intelligence. It gave me this link: members5.boardhost.com They were discussing poor people and how to educate them. So, which will move, the mountain or Mohammed? Of course fibre will spread more yet, but people will do a lot of moving to where they need to be.
It looks like crystallization to me. Like oil and limestone out of the ecosphere and into permanent graves [other than a bit of erosion]. Okay, they aren't strictly crystals, but they are like going to like.
The much bemoaned gaps are not going to close. They are going to widen. It's not a knowledge gap, or wealth gap, or electronics gap, it's a brain-power gap, which is mostly a DNA gap. Giving a chimp a computer won't be any use to them, and people with low cognitive abilities will not make a lot of use of cyberspace, just as they never made much use of libraries, which sat there empty.
Mqurice |
