Notes

I think we limit our imaginations by thinking of time as linear. When we do, there's a very real risk of pigeon-holing a lot more than just our notions of what constitutes "advanced." We become blinded by the idea that only tactile technology is the measure of humanities advances. For those of us who've lived several decades, we can see a number of practices that have changed quite drastically and along with those specific practices, so have a number of adjacent ones suffered. For instance, books, one of the primary materials that we used to learn and communicate what we had learned, has become a shadow of their former self. Complex ideas that came to us embedded in dense paragraphs and sentences, are all but gone in today's literature. "Good enough," says the average reader. However, my point is not to argue about the length of an essay nor the merits of simplification. My concern is over the weakening of the average human's ability to remain focussed on complex ideas delivered solely by language. Our brains have become increasingly dependent on dumbed-down intellectual pablum. Instead of building and maintaining structures of thought, we've opted for blurbs and soundbites. The intellectual sequences that produce logical ideas that helped us grow are no longer our property. Instead, they've been condensed and transmogrified into a monetized system controlled by others and jwhere the bottom line is the only one that matters.
The same holds for the Maths. And one need only to look at the corner store to see the damage wreaked by forsaking the multiplication tables. The burden of learning by rote has been exchanged for little pictures on cash registers that are so simple even a child can ring in a week's grocery order without batting an eye. Because of this, a part of the brain's logic processor has gone limp for lack of exercise. The oral traditions that preceded written communication have been abandoned and become largely untrusted. We live in a gimmick and gadget proliferated universe where strong brains and their adjacent intellects have been replaced by thought bots.