Things I dreamed of as a kid – like a way for any question to be answered instantly – come standard for Generation Omega. I can’t even guess at the full implications of this, but one thing is obvious to anyone who’s ever met one of these kids: they’re not dumb.
You can trace it back to our very first communication tool, music: a mechanism that vastly improved our individual memory, which allowed us to pass on complicated information (like epic histories), to humans well beyond those we knew in our own lifetimes. This meant you could have the knowledge of 100 people with only 12 mouths to feed. This cumulative knowledge led to new tools, like written language, which increased our memory even more, which fostered more ideas and more new inventions – like the printing press. Communication = innovation = better ways to communicate.
Which brings us to the first generation of digital natives. Their parents aren’t making them quicker, smarter, better multitaskers – machines are.
How our machines are making humans who can make better machines
The Internet is not making anyone stupid. Stop asking.
It is changing us though.
Things I dreamed of as a kid – like a way for any question to be answered instantly – come standard for Generation Omega. I can’t even guess at the full implications of this, but one thing is obvious to anyone who’s ever met one of these kids: they’re not dumb.
You can trace it back to our very first communication tool, music: a mechanism that vastly improved our individual memory, which allowed us to pass on complicated information (like epic histories), to humans well beyond those we knew in our own lifetimes. This meant you could have the knowledge of 100 people with only 12 mouths to feed. This cumulative knowledge led to new tools, like written language, which increased our memory even more, which fostered more ideas and more new inventions – like the printing press. Communication = innovation = better ways to communicate.
Which brings us to the first generation of digital natives. Their parents aren’t making them quicker, smarter, better multitaskers – machines are.
So my question is, what machines will they build?
Image via The Hidden Bunker.