The Producer

I recently read a piece in the Financial Times that seemed to be another sign that the future will not be one where being well read is a common trait.

The front-page story told how many in the City of London has been enthralled by a 15-year-old intern’s observations about media consumption amongst his friends. From the FT article:

Mr Robson had little comfort for struggling print publishers, saying no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text” rather than see summaries online or on television.

It just so happens that I was having a conversation with a professor of philosophy(!) over the weekend who said much the same thing. She said it was difficult to get her students to read. She was talking about college students. Isn’t that what most of their education consists of, reading and discussing complex texts?

It seems like we’ve been hearing for years about how fewer and fewer people are reading books and newspapers. The learned have complained that information is being chopped into smaller and smaller bits, to the point where coherent arguments can no longer be made in the time allotted by society.

But the ability to think for yourself and puzzle through problems big and small comes — in large part — from reading and understanding the structure of ideas and relationships. As a colleague said to me, the mind is like any other muscle. You must exercise your mental faculties to build them up and use them.

Are we on the road to a time when a small class of thinkers who have an unnatural predilection for things like reading will rule over a class of people who are happy to consume without thinking?

Well, that’s a drastic conclusion to draw. Still, I’m concerned that people seem to be seeing less value in reading substantial works and reports. It surprises me since I find such pleasure in those pursuits, while also living much of my life in the digital domain.

An op-ed piece in The Washington Post‘s “Outlook” section this past Sunday contained one of the most astonishing arguments I’ve ever seen published in a major American media outlet. It had the hallmarks of Jonathan Smith’s “modest proposal.” But I didn’t get the impression that it was in any way satirical.

In the piece, GlobalSecurity.org’s John Pike envisions a future in which American robot armies spread across the planet to pacify unruly regions, such as Darfur. The dawn of this robot-enforced Pax Americana is years away, not decades. He sees this as a good thing.

Within a decade, the Army will field armed robots with intellects that possess, as H.G. Wells put it, “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.”

That’s right, the advantages of killer robots are that they will have superior intellects and lack sympathy for human life. You have to wonder if Pike has seen The Terminator or The Matrix. I mean, modern popular culture is full of expressions of our worry that machines will soon rule over us. Yet he sees deadly machines as the solution to man’s inhumanity to man.

Armed robots will all be snipers. Stone-cold killers, every one of them. They will aim with inhuman precision and fire without human hesitation.

The ability to remove humans from one side of the war equation is, as he sees it, the key to the end of “the large-scale organized killing that has characterized six millenniums of human history.”

I’m all for utopian visions where the earth’s six billion inhabitants — including 300 million Americans — live in peace. But are partisan robot armies really the way to bring peace to the people of earth?

There are so many ways in which such a strategy could go wrong that it boggles the mind. And even if it did work, at its base it is an argument that the world’s problems can be solved with more effecient killing machines. It’s an argument that discounts the intrinsic value of human life.

The 2008 F1 finale at Interlagos was one of the most exciting races in the sport’s history, even outdoing the 1986 championship fight in Australia between Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost. For once, Formula One exuded excitement and grace.

Lost in the excitement of Felipe Massa’s win and Lewis Hamilton’s historic championship was the latest sign that Fernando Alonso stands above them all.

Fomula One my be in the midst of a financial crisis, but it is in another golden age of driving talent. Alonso, Hamilton, Massa, Kimi Raikkonen, Sebastian Vettel, Robert Kubica and Nico Rosberg all bring excitement and talent to the track. But out of that bunch it is only Alonso and Vettel who have proven the can take inferior equipment and win with it.

The job that Alonso has done at Renault this year is proof that he was not diminished by his sojourn at McLaren. The Spaniard has led a talented but broken team from the bottom half of the field to the top three in the span of a season where the top two teams developed their cars at an unprecedented pace.

So, while observers fall all over themselves to predict multiple titles for Hamilton, it is two-time champion Alonso who is own track to add more trophies to his cabinet because there is no better driver in the sport today.