Opus 2025-138: Regressive Progress

At what point does something new actually represent a big step backwards?  My thinking at present is focused on technology and how the younger generations often are not learning to read or to do simple math.  It’s all very nice when the skills and advanced civilization are replaced by automation but I don’t know that it’s healthy for digital screens to replace ink on paper.

I revel in much of modern technology.  I am loving my iPad.  While I’m showing concern, I’m also dictating this to the technology that is typing out what I say.  I love word processors and spread sheets that are done on the computer.  Corrections are easy.  Calculations are instant.  It’s great to be able to correct your mistakes or change your phraseology.  So I like a lot of what is available.  But with every new addition of my word processing software, the features I find very convenient disappear to be replaed by bells and whistles, bells and whistles that I will never use because they are not something that I find useful.

The problem is not refusing to be open to new things.  The problem is not having the discernment to know whether the new thing is an advantage or a ball and chain that keeps you from moving forward.  Many improvements are in the ADD of the programer and sever your options.  Change can be dangerous when it’s done for the wrong reasons.  Look at this verse from Proverbs,

Proverbs 24:21 (KJV) My son, fear thou the LORD and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change:

The KJV terminology is fun.  I specially like the word meddle.  Several translations throw in the idea of avoiding people who are rebels.  Some rebels are needed.  Most rebels are pretty much self-centered people trying to get things their own way, rather than what is the best way.  There is a difference.

Let’s go with the electronic devices that replace books and reading.  I don’t know if you’ve experienced it yet, but when things are digital they can be changed by you, but they can also be changed by others, often without your knowledge.  A simple example of that is going back and looking at things that I have dictated into my iPad and finding that my iPad has changed them.  Often I will proofread what I’ve said, and be satisfied with it, but when I go back to edit it later, find that it has been changed after I moved on.  How do you find truth in history, philosophy, economics, or any other field, if the computing device is free to change them when they want to.

I’m not really worried about AI taking over the world.  What I am worried about is programmers who tell the computer to make changes or to delete things that they don’t like.  I am relatively sure that some nefarious operator removed the text of the novel 1984 from my Kindle.  I can’t prove it.  I have no way of knowing it beyond a shadow of a doubt.  My only indication is that I have a file that did not have 1984 in the file name that contain notes from the book, but the book itself had disappeared.  Come to your own conclusion.

It troubles me that many in the younger generation cannot pick up a book and read it.  Often it is just sloth or some kind of reluctance or refusal to put any effort into understanding.  I base that on experiences teaching middle school, where students would tell me the answer was not on the page.  When I would force them to read it out loud to me they would stop halfway through and say, “Oh…”  It wasn’t that they couldn’t read it and understand it.  It was that they refused to.  If it was a problem with processing, which was solved by reading it out loud, they could have done that before I came over and hovered over them.  They chose not to.

Some things such as cursive writing are questionable, I guess.  I learned them, so I figure others should, but I’m open to the fact that phasing it out might work.  But being able to read for yourself and understand what you read will never go out of style except in a mindless dictatorship where tyrants tell you everything you need to know and keep you from doing anything they don’t want you to have.

Some progress isn’t.

homo unius libri