While we’ve been making computers “smarter,” people have been getting dumbed down by advertising, by bad education, by political propaganda, etc. As Dave Frishberg sang, we’re “marooned in a blizzard of lies.”

Even honest research in honest journals is so overwhelming in quantity that it’s hard to sift through enough of it to find the gems. And worthwhile stuff can easily end up ignored. Who knows if a great general solution to some serious current problem was published in 1952, and forgotten? It doesn’t help that fueled partly by the factors mentioned in the previous paragraph, we have such an attitude of “tommorowism” that an idea from last night gets dismissed as “Oh, that’s so 12 hours ago!”

Maybe it will become trendy to respect the best of the past again, and “tomorrowism” will eventually be dismissed as “so 2009.”

Computers may become more clever, but can they become wise?

I suppose that the Singularity means that computers will be so powerful that we’ll be able to test the “million monkeys typing out Shakespeare” and other Darwinian ideas, that random variation can eventually lead to higher and higher intelligence. But what happens if it doesn’t work? Then we’re left with a big question.