{"id":6452,"date":"2015-09-08T11:31:43","date_gmt":"2015-09-08T17:31:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6452"},"modified":"2015-09-15T07:51:17","modified_gmt":"2015-09-15T13:51:17","slug":"smartness-is-a-zero-sum-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6452","title":{"rendered":"Smartness is a zero-sum game"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blue\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In her article “The Internet of Way Too Many Things,” Allison Arleff reviews<\/a> some of the exciting new products on display at Target’s trendy Open House store in San Francisco. There’s Leeo, a night light “that ‘listens’ for your smoke detector to go off and then calls your smartphone to let you know your house might be on fire.” There’s Whistle, a $100\u00a0doggie dongle that “attaches to your pet\u2019s collar and allows you to set a daily activity goal customized to your dog\u2019s age, breed and weight.” And there’s Mimo, a\u00a0web-enabled onesie that monitors your baby’s “body position”\u00a0during the night. “When Mimo is connected to other devices in your home and discerns that your baby is stirring,” reports\u00a0Arleff, “the lights turn on, coffee begins brewing and some Baby Mozart starts playing on the stereo.”<\/p>\n

Welcome to Peter Thiel’s “innovation desert<\/a>.” You’ll die of thirst, but at least the mirages are amusing.<\/p>\n

There’s something else going on here,\u00a0though,\u00a0something deeper than the production of trinkets for neurotics. Each of these products is an example of a defining\u00a0trend of our networked age:\u00a0\u00a0the outsourcing of common sense to gadgetry. A foundational level of human perception and competence is being mechanized through apps and online services. The more mediated our lives become, the more we rely on media to make sense of the world for us. We can’t even trust ourselves to take Rover\u00a0for a walk.<\/p>\n

I would like to modestly propose a hypothesis that I think explains a lot about the way we live today:<\/p>\n

Smartness is a zero-sum game.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I call it the Law of the Conservation of Intelligence. There is a fixed amount of intelligence in the world, and every time\u00a0we think we’re creating new intelligence, what we’re actually doing is just redistributing the intelligence that’s already there.<\/p>\n

Take the so-called Internet of Things.\u00a0When we imbue an inanimate object, a thing, with smartness, we’re not conjuring up\u00a0that smartness out of nothing. We’re simply transferring a bit of smartness that already exists,\u00a0in our own minds, into the thing. IBM tells us that we’re building a\u00a0Smarter Planet, but what IBM\u00a0doesn’t say, at least not in its marketing materials, is that as the planet gets smarter its occupants\u00a0get dumber.<\/p>\n

If you’re struggling to follow my line of thought here, let me offer you\u00a0a\u00a0simple,\u00a0easy-to-understand\u00a0graphic:<\/p>\n

\"intelligence\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Arleff describes another new product that provides a practical\u00a0illustration of my point. The product is\u00a0called Refuel. It’s\u00a0a\u00a0“black plastic sensor-enabled ring that monitors your propane tank levels and sends you notifications when propane is low.\u201d Running out of propane when a hot dog is only half done is frustrating, and it can ruin a good cookout and even result in social\u00a0embarrassment. To avoid this situation, owners of gas grills will often, through their own innate resources, develop a means of gauging the amount of gas left in a\u00a0tank. Some will, for instance, lift the tank and judge its fullness by its weight. Others will tap the tank, judging its fullness by the sound it makes. These are simple examples of how a person, through experience dealing with the sometimes irritating stuff of the world, gains the intelligence necessary to operate successfully in the world. But as soon as you introduce a black plastic sensor-enabled ring that buzzes your smartphone when\u00a0the tank’s low, you remove the need to grapple with the mysteries of the propane tank\u00a0and hence are also relieved of the opportunity to develop insight into the\u00a0nature of such tanks. The intelligence that would have lodged in your own mind is instead transferred into the thing.<\/p>\n

Now, I know that the Law of the Conservation of Intelligence will be controversial. It’s nothing if not counterintuitive. We\u00a0have long taken it for granted\u00a0that intelligence behaves not like energy but like the universe itself: it just keeps expanding. Intelligence\u00a0is perpetually tumescent. For proof, we often\u00a0point to the famous Flynn Effect. This is the discovery that, throughout most of the twentieth century, IQ scores steadily increased. Surely, the Flynn Effect shows that the sum total of intelligence is expanding.<\/p>\n

Actually, though, the Flynn Effect is just another illustration of the Law of the Conservation of Intelligence. As James Flynn, the political scientist\u00a0who discovered the effect, has explained, what the Flynn Effect really shows is a redistribution of intelligence, not a growth of intelligence. One way of being smart \u2014 the way required to do well on IQ tests \u2014 goes up, but other ways of being smart go down. We aren’t “more intelligent” than our ancestors, Flynn has said<\/a>, but rather we have “learnt to apply our intelligence to a new set of of problems.” We have, to be precise, “detached logic from the concrete.”<\/p>\n

So, for instance, we may be much better than our great-grandparents at answering a multiple choice question like this:<\/p>\n

“A tractor\u00a0is to a farmer as a hammer is to a ________.”<\/p>\n

A. Turkey
\nB. Carpenter
\nC.\u00a0Nail
\nD.\u00a0CEO<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But our great-grandparents would be\u00a0much better than we are at\u00a0diagnosing and fixing an actual malfunctioning tractor. We can do analogies till the cows come home, but if our tractor breaks down in the middle of a field, we’re fucked. We’ve shifted intelligence from that part of our brain labeled “common sense about real tractors” to the one labeled “abstract reasoning about conceptual tractors.”<\/p>\n

This is probably one of the reasons why per-capita ownership of tractors has gone down sharply over the years while per-capita consumption of plastic containers of triple-washed baby lettuce leaves has gone way up. In a decades-long process of intelligence redistribution, the crop-growing knowledge\u00a0that was once distributed widely among the population\u00a0was\u00a0first concentrated into the minds of a small group of specialists and then transferred into machines. You can, today, be too dim\u00a0to know how to wash lettuce, and yet you can still have a perfectly\u00a0nice salad.<\/p>\n

There have recently been signs that the Flynn Effect is petering out. IQ scores are stagnating, or even slipping<\/a>, in some developed countries. Here in the United States, we’re seeing a steady\u00a0erosion of intelligence measures as reflected in the results<\/a> of\u00a0SAT tests\u00a0\u2014 even as classrooms are outfitted with all manner of “smart technology.”\u00a0This, too, makes sense when seen through the lens of my hypothesis. Thanks to machine learning and other artificial-intelligence techniques, computers are getting better at analytical tasks. So as we become more reliant on machines for abstract thinking, our own ability to think abstractly shrinks, just as our own ability to think concretely has already withered. The cloud gets smarter; our own minds\u00a0get cloudier. Thus is intelligence conserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her article “The Internet of Way Too Many Things,” Allison Arleff reviews some of the exciting new products on display at Target’s trendy Open House store in San Francisco. There’s Leeo, a night light “that ‘listens’ for your smoke detector to go off and then calls your smartphone to let you know your house […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6452"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6525,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6452\/revisions\/6525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}