Weeeeellll ... That is pretty much wrong, isn't it? He is predicting the dumbing down of America, but, the exact opposite has happened. He based the prediction on how TV technology was developing and even the 10 second soundbite getting shorter and shorter because peoples attention span getting shorter. I grew up in that era, I remember it, and I remember teachers talking about that phenomenon. I don't think that is what is happening. I think this is happening instead: * Each new generation has a shorter attention span than the previous yes. This doesn't mean lower iq, what this means is their brains are being calibrated for a FASTER world. It isn't that they aren't so much as interested or have lower iq, the kids just find most adults, news programs and everything around them too boring because they are providing information too slow and at the wrong resolution. They absorb more data at smaller and smaller details by virtue of being calibrated by technology. Note, I am only talking about generations born in the last 120 or so years after the industrial revolution really started to get going and allow rapid development of new technologies. Before that the world was one speed, either the speed of walking or the speed of a horse, all around the world. As a side point, our brains are built for that world, not the one we live in now. * He is basically insinuating that Americans will get stupider and not want to think about things deeply. Well, this is demonstrably wrong. The Joe Rogan podcast popularized the 3+ hour discussion format (wasn't the first, but he was at the crest of that wave). Now, we have ALL SORTS of 3+ hour conversations on all kinds of topics, just to start with. We have all kinds of websites like Poal that simultaneously act as a quick response mechanism to our nervous systems but also as an archive of knowledge and re-calibration machine for our brains that allow groups like us to get together, find out we exist and re-calibrate your knowledge through sharing and conversation into a unified whole. There are entirely new social media systems that will be coming online that take these trends towards allowing us to zoom into topics with ever greater details as well as tools that will allow us to zoom out as well and see patterns and trends at various levels of resolution on almost any topic. The key to deep thinking is data storage. Human brains have been able to do amazing things for at least 500 000 years, probably 1 000 000 years. The problem with the thinking the brains of the past could do is they had no data storage technology available to them. If a hunter gatherer came up with algebra they had no data storage to write algebra down and pass on knowledge and allow multiple generations to work over a single data set. Today, not only do we have ever growing data storage capabilities, we have ever growing networking that allows our brains cognitive economies of scale that even Sagan could not really imagine. We are now building technologies ON TOP OF storage and networking that are independent of the networking and storage (you can move them around this virtual network) and are gaining all kinds of analytical functions to do various things. Poal is one of these, there will be new ones. I heard Joe Rogan once say something like "the human race is birthing something , we don't know what it is" ... and then another thing as well "the human race is the biological sex organ of the machines, something is wanting to be born out of us", or something like that. I don't think those are his quotes, I think he attributed those to others, but, I think this is where the fear of AI comes because we can all sense that something is being birthed from us and we cannot help our selves but to birth another type of thing that may eventually enslave us. Before that happens, people will get a lot smarter I think.