Michael's Corner

The Wright Brothers’ first flight was 120 feet and lasted twelve seconds. Had Usain Bolt witnessed their feat, he might have been mildly amused while grinning that his gold medals and world records were safe even against machines.

Back to the drawing board, the Wright Brothers went. Their tenacity turned 120 feet and twelve seconds into a thousand feet, a mile, and eventually it laid the groundwork for interstate and transcontinental flights. But what if Orville and Wilbur had access to intelligence that enabled them to go from “Hey, let’s see if we can get this contraption off the ground,” straight to transcontinental flights. Think of all the steps and progressions they could’ve skipped—all the cigarettes, cups of coffee, and headbanging they might’ve avoided.

But that’s the beauty of being human: we don’t get smarter by reverse engineering solutions and equations handed down to us by sources of artificial intelligence; we get smarter by filling wastepaper baskets.

We just watched school systems spend the past two decades teaching kids how to pass tests instead of how to think. How’d that work out? If you’ve raised a young millennial or Zoomer, you know the answer. You also know there’s a vast difference between “being good at school” and being a heterodox thinker with genuine intelligence. And because we stayed quiet, watching a generation of kids get drunk on civics and pronouns while history and geography were ushered quietly into the night, the powerbrokers who launched these new paradigms thought, “Gee, I wonder if the same bullshit would work on adults?”

Now there’s a dystopia for you: a world where adults and kids get to be stupid at the same time. I know, I know, I’m a grouchy old prick. But I’m a grouchy old prick who can still read a map.😎