From Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:
Opinion: hell no! The smarter the population, the better. Educate everyone. Provide good pre-natal care and childhood nutrition. We want a populace able and willing to think clearly. Even if they come up with entirely wrong answers, they will be better wrong answers.
You can’t be “too smart” the same way you can’t be too rich, too healthy, or too happy.
Smart people are still able to do “sweat labor.” They can still dig ditches and mop floors, the kind of jobs that less-intelligent people can do. And these jobs need to be done. The smart workers will just be thinking higher thoughts while working.
I think the problem with Mond’s philosophy (or his Cyprus example) was in assuming that we needed Epsilons to do the crap work, rather than have the Alphas design automatons that would do the crap work so the Alphas could spend their time making whatever passed for art in the Brave New World.
Cyprus shouldn’t have fallen into civil war, it should have blossomed as the Alphas automated all the scutwork.
I don’t blame Huxley for this, as a lot of the robotic innovation we’re used to now was decades away when he wrote his novel, but it’s laughably silly today.
Huxley’s future society was technologically advanced by his standards (and even ours) but it was also specifically static. There’s another passage in the book, just a few paragraphs after the quote in the OP about labour-saving devices being invented but suppressed:
I don’t get why it doesn’t occur to them to just produce fewer Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, but again, Huxley did not (likely could not) anticipate the degree of automation we currently have, let alone what we anticipate just a few decades from now.
Huxley certainly didn’t since the book was intended, amongst other things, to be an attack on the tracking system in British schools.
If society is the same way it is now except that everyone is smarter, frankly I don’t see anything changing that much. It’s just that the baselines for “dumb” and “smart” will be shifted to the right. Someone who scores an IQ of 100 is average in our current framework. In an uber smart world, he or she would be mentally retarded and would be educated as such. They will likely not be represented in the 70th percentile of college entrance exam takers, which means they are more likely to become the next dishwasher at TGIFriday’s than a doctor or lawyer. Just like how people with IQs of 80 are now.
There would be some differences, maybe. I don’t think everyone would be listening to classical music instead of pop music, but maybe there would be less religiosity and emotional thinking. But unless we changed our entire socioeconomic system, which hinges on guaranteed winners and losers, then those differences aren’t real important.
Two things come to mind for me reading this.
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Due to the Flynn effect IQs are about 30 points higher than they were a century ago. I read (I believe Steven Berlin Johnson) say an IQ that would put you in the top 10% around 1920 now puts you at around the bottom 1/3. So the average person today is an alpha by 1900 standards. I think an average IQ today is equal to about 130 near 1900.
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it reminds me of the story of the guy who wanted to become a cop, but the department wouldn’t let him because his IQ was too high (125). They said he would get bored and quit after they spent lots of time and money training him.
Aside from that, I don’t know. We have no real working models of a truly high IQ society in the real world.
I would assume in a truly high IQ society labor saving devices would proliferate and that would remove some of the stress of people being bored at work. Or in a society where everyone was bored at work maybe work would change to find forms of stress relief.
Overall I don’t agree with Huxley, but again I don’t know of any societies that were truly high IQ (150+ for everyone).
But, yellowjacketcoder, who would have *assembled *the automated devices? (This may bring up a chicken-or-egg question: would a population with Alpha intelligence ***but without the conditioning ***have been able to get over themselves?)
Even that sort of adaptation would counter the notion that you have arrived at optimum social stability with the extant stratification distribution(*) and you don’t want ideas that there may be a better, different way to spread.
(*And if the 1/9 ratio is to be sustained, you may have to proportionally cull at the top as well)
This doesn’t necessarily have much to do with people today actually being smarter than they were a century ago. Some of the proposed explanations for the Flynn effect are simply greater familiarity with testing, or even greater familiarity with mazes and puzzles similar to those used in IQ tests. While it seems plausible to me that improved medical care and nutrition have made a difference in intelligence, I don’t think any of the experts believe that the average person a century ago was really borderline mentally retarded.
What in the world is the point of a post like this? Your counter to her statement is to link to another science fiction book?
To answer the question: I think someone’s capacity for boredom is completely divorced from their intelligence. Some people find routine work soothing, some find it aggravating.
Both amount to sociological thought experiments. A thought experiment is the only kind that can be run here.
You countered someone’s statement of opinion with a link to a book of fiction, with a dismissive query tacked on. I’m not going to speak for her, but I didn’t read the link once I saw that it was a book of fiction with you making no attempt at argument or persuasion.
Translation, you made an extremely stupid post and are now trying to pass it off as clever.
Perhaps you could articulate your own feelings on the subject rather than throwing up links to what others have said.
Maybe BrainGlutton is an Epsilon. The caste is known for their non sequiturs.
What nonsequitur? An SF novel about the possible social disturbances caused by everyone becoming really smart is directly relevant to the OP. You’d know that if you’d read both books.
It depends on what the smart people are doing.
Smart people and dumb people, alike, working for themselves in a greedy fashion will destabilize the society in which they live.
Smart people and dumb people, alike, working for societies betterment will stabilize the society in which they live.
It has very little to do with “danger” to society and very much to do with the speed at which society updated and/or advances in terms of how many smart people you have in it. The smarter you are, the faster you can come up with effective solutions for, as an example, integrating and updating to a new technology.
We have had a decided turn towards self-interest and down-right greed as a society over the last 100-200 years.
Well, that’s a compelling argument.
Automation was envisioned, but primarily as physical automation- having one backhoe instead of twenty ditch diggers. At least until the idea of robots or androids arose, no one seems to have anticipated mental automation- replacing a human controller with an electronic mechanism. Case in point: in B.N.W. rather than simply having a push-button panel that automatically sends the elevator to the floor you want, Epsilons work as elevator operators, because they don’t find it boring to go up and down all day.
A lot of older science fiction is like that- presuming that it will always take (at least a minimal) human intelligence to do things we now have electronics do. H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machinepresumes that the class structure would endure for so long that the elite and the workers would become separate species. Heck, for all I know Asimov presumed that it would require a robot elevator operator to automate elevators.