[CatWChainsaw]

The story by E.M. Forster is actually "The Machine Stops". The dystopia that came to mind for me was Harrison Bergeron, only instead of a human Handicapper General enforcing an equality of sub-mediocrity, it will be the masses and the tools they were bequeathed by the FAANGs. Having also been at uni in '11, I agree - GenZ and below are unnerving to observe.

[ryandrake]

Not just Gen Z. 54% of US adults read below a 6th grade reading level[1][2][3]. The younger generations might skew the results, I haven't dug deep into the links.

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-...

2: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s....

3: https://map.barbarabush.org

[CatWChainsaw]

The mind fairly boggles. That's depressing.

[ryandrake]

That’s what happens when the political apparatus shortchanges public education for decades: illiteracy and innumeracy.

[ehnto]

I wonder what impact it will have on America's ability to operate over the next few decades. Will a lack of intelligent communicators find themselves unable to coordinate complex business? Even the simplest of enterprises at scale are quite complex.

[ryandrake]

I expect the end game if it continues is something like Elysium where we're going to bifurcate into a small, literate, educated class, whose parents were able to send them to private schools or overseas to be educated, and who will run the show, and a large underclass who end up as fodder for the corporate machine and/or the war machine. Today, we're in a competitive race to make enough to ensure our great-great-great-grandchildren end up in the first group and not the second.

[galdosdi]

NB- this is in reply to an earlier version of my comment, which I edited out purely for brevity, but now guiltily am restoring here-- where I worried we're marching towards a dystopia like the ones imagined in many works like Idiocracy, Wall-E, or The Machine Stops (misremembering the title as The Machine Breaks Down or something)

You make a very good point. I am starting to hear things along the lines of "But it's normal that some people learn better from videos" and "Why are you gatekeeping this knowledge" and even here you increasingly see references to videos that are much lower detail but higher time commitment summaries of writing that has much more detail available yet could be consumed, skimmed, etc more quickly than sitting through a video that your eyes have no ability to skip around, rushing past the irrelevant and dwelling on the relevant, without ever having to click a button.

They already invented telepathic interfaces -- books.

[CatWChainsaw]

I was really confused when I posted my comment and didn't see any mention of the titles I saw in the original.

A succinct encapsulation of the problem is that the total "signal" of civilization is now being eclipsed exponentially, in all sorts of ways, by "noise". Some people say we're heading towards singularity, and others towards collapse; either way I'm confident we'll live to see some sort of great Reckoning, because I don't see how the generations after Millennial can sustain the current setup and weight of civilization.