MY SON HAS READ THE INTERNET
In today’s New York Times there is an article by John Schwartz in which he writes about the future as though we should all assume it is irredeemably screwed. He is nostalgic for the fifties and sixties, and for “….the future we imagined back when it was something to be hoped for rather than feared”. While Mr. Schwartz is entitled to his nihilism and low expectations, I personally think he is bonkers. And I say this because I’ve recently noticed that my 17 year old son Jeffrey has read the Internet.
It started as a dinner table joke. A year or so ago, I noticed that there appeared to be no topic that could be mentioned, certainly if it was anywhere in the sciences, where I knew more than Jeffrey. And I’m 56 and he’s 17. As I pride myself on having been alert, inquisitive and an addicted reader of everything in sight for at least 40 years, this seemed quite odd. So I’ve been studying Jeffrey like a kind of anthropologist and have reached the conclusion that Something Very Big is going on all of a sudden, and it is a seismic shift in culture and society that will soon give the lie to Mr. Schwartz’s negativity. In fact, I think it indicates that an unprecedented wave of progress and improvement will soon be upon us, led by young people like Jeffrey who right now are still teenagers.
OK, so he hasn’t actually read the entire Internet. He’s trying, but it is rather too big for even the autodidactic brainiac who is my son. But I’m telling you that, no kidding, since he was ten years old, this young man has spent around four hours a day, 365 days a year, reading the Internet. And interestingly, very little of this seems to have been distractive entertainment. No, it appears as though he’s been methodically reading just about everything he could access without a password in the widest possible aspects of all the applied sciences and beyond and through them in politics, sociology and generally The World We Live In. And I calculate he’s been reading the Internet so far for about ten thousand hours. I’m not kidding: do the math. And not only has he made that personal investment in the combined online output of two millennia of intellectual writing, but he has wired himself online into a substantial network of deep thinkers, including a bunch of PhD’s as well as abundant other young people who are also reading the knowledge base we call the Internet. And they are endlessly discussing seriously deep stuff online and often as a result face to face.
So what is going on here? Well, apparently, and only in the last decade, we have abolished geography as an impediment to learning. When I used to sit in the Cambridge University Library, which is a mandated Copyright Library that contains as a result pretty much every book you could ever want to read, I was still at a serious disadvantage in acquiring knowledge as against Jeffrey sitting in his teenager’s bedroom in West Los Angeles. First of all, I had to know what I was looking for, so there were few random serendipitous discoveries of tangential knowledge: The professor gave you a list, you went and found the books and you read them. Every so often, you’d use the bibliography in book A to go onwards under your own steam to book B, but mostly, you just read the suggested books to go deeper into your subject. And you pretty much had to start the book at the beginning and read it through to find the relevant stuff. Me, mostly I knew in advance what I wanted to find out, I found it, I read it and left the building.
Not Jeffrey. His reading of the Internet has a whole different methodology and it has little to do with school curricula, assigned reading and “How To Ace the ACT and SAT”. He takes care of those for sure, but he left them behind long ago as a sole basis for his reading. Instead, he has many advantages that I never had: He can word search. He can hyper-click. He can read ten things at a time in ten open windows. He can search the whole massive, aggregate chunk of human knowledge that exists on the Internet by concept and he can meet and discuss it as he sees fit, often with the author, often with others with common interest in the material. He is sitting in a virtual University Library, but with all the books open at once, and with the aisles full of interested parties in one seamless, endless seminar or teach-in, a kind of exogenous brain of all the knowledge of the world. And he's a Rising Senior in high school. Go figure.
I don’t think this has ever been possible before in the ten millennia of human intellectual development. And it makes me a pretty huge optimist as young people like Jeffrey grow up and start asserting themselves intellectually, in politics, as scientists, as thought-leaders and as citizens of the world. And I suspect they might even rescue us from the dysfunctions of old-style democracy.
Consider if you will, the mind of Henry the Eighth, king of Great Britain. Some five centuries ago, he was much more than a womanizer and beheader of inconvenient wives. He was very, very smart…. but that alone did not make him a great leader. The thing was that he knew pretty much everything a human being could know in that place, at that time. When he met with his military advisors, he knew as much as them about the art and science of warfare. When he met with agricultural experts, he was their match in knowing all about farming. His understanding of the weather was as good as anyone else’s he could consult. In fact, in the twenty separate and unrelated areas of knowledge important for a king to make a decision, important for him to be a great leader, he was a world expert, all on his own. He did not always get things right, leaders never do, but he had the huge advantage of being able to process all available resources of knowledge inside his own head, and on the fly. No need for a whole bunch of committee meetings for Henry.
Now think of a modern day leader. Let’s use Bill Clinton in the White House, not because of some other unfortunate similarities to Henry the Eighth, but because when we add in Al Gore as Vice-President, even President Clinton’s most ardent opponents should concede that the two of them together had Very Big Brains at work. They had the Rhodes Scholar intellect we want at work in the White House. But for good or bad, the world in which they operated was one heck of a lot more complicated than in Henry’s simpler age.
And why? Precisely because Henry was pretty much the last leader who could Know Everything Available. Since then, the database of human knowledge has grown exponentially every year…. call it the intellectual parallel to Moore’s Law…. but the poor old human brain has remained exactly the same size, operating at the same speed, with the same mental processes dealing with all the information. So that even the smartest among us until recently have had to go deeper and deeper in order to be an expert in anything at all. But importantly, in order to do so with those same-sized brains, we’ve had to go narrower and narrower. I was joking with the radiologist recently who analyzed the scans of my knee. “How are knees” I asked, “more or less interesting than elbows?” “Oh”, he replied “I don’t do elbows these days. I’m the knee man here”. I was relieved that he confirmed he did actually do both left and right knees, and I took some great comfort from the fact that he must be really good at knees if that’s all he did professionally.
The problem however is obvious: Life is Not Knees. And the colossal challenges that face our civilization are intrinsically multi-disciplinary. If the fixed size of the brain’s traditional capacity to learn has remained static, how can we ever hope to conquer those hellaciously complicated problems that involve twenty disciplines, all of whose experts are in intellectual silos: deep but very, very narrow? And especially when human nature makes grown-ups invariably believe their own silo is more important, more compelling, than all those other silos they little understand.
Well, corporations and governments have taken different stabs at that precise problem over time, with mixed success. Our President has a Cabinet of specialized leaders reporting to him or her. The hope is that they will each know more than the President about their own area of responsibility. In the case of a smart leadership, the Clinton / Gore way to lead was to convene world-class experts and attempt to make them cooperate. But the challenge is that N.I.H. stands for more in such a room than the National Institutes of Health. Though the experts are asked to leave their “Not Invented Here” attitudes at the door, human nature brings them into the room.
When Steven Spielberg and I founded The Starbright Foundation in 1990, we wanted a fearless Campaign Chairman, who would aggressively ask people for big donations to our then fledgling non-profit studio. Kathy Kennedy brilliantly suggest General Norman Schwarzkopf. So off I went to meet him in Tampa. There I was jawing on about how in Starbright we were generalists trying to make a wildly diverse bunch of specialist experts cooperate for the first time to create our special software for sick kids: writers, directors, artists, oncologists, hematologists, psychiatrists…. A set of experts who had never before encountered most of those other experts professionally. And I was saying that our job was to be the generalists in the middle, constantly yanking back the strategy which every expert seemed to want to yank left or right to serve their own narrow silo of expertise. We were the strategic drivers, they were the collaborating resources.
General Schwarzkopf interrupted me: “What do you know about the U.S. Army?” he asked. “Almost nothing” I answered. “Well” he said. “When you join the Army, we don’t just give you a rank. We also give you a Specialty: You are a rifleman or a cook or a driver or a signalman. And we give you a pin that says so. And it does not matter how much we promote you over the years; you still keep your Speciality”.
“Until one day, if you are a damn good leader, we may decide to make you a General. And in the ceremony when you get your Star, we take away your Specialty Pin…. Because you are no longer a Specialist. You are a General”.
I sat there stunned by the enormity of the revelation…. It had never occurred to me before that in an Army, the consequence of failure is death and injury and loss of your defined mission. So you’d better get your act together and put the generalist, the General in charge of the experts.
That’s all well and good, but how are our leaders in any area to possibly possess the necessary knowledge to tame the experts and lead them back to valuing their collaboration with other experts in support of the common mission? How exactly do we do that?
Well, with great difficulty I think! This is arguably now the biggest systemic challenge to the world and to Life As We know It: The leaders know a lot less about each relevant discipline than the experts they must keep in line. Oh dear! Is there hope, and if so, where?
Well, I think it is in Jeffrey Samuelson and, in this country at least, the eighty million other members of Jeff’s Generation Y, the Millennials all around us. It is not only that they are more pro-social, more engaged in their world than any generation in the last three, nor that they are more concerned and more viral in their relationships on and off line.
It dawns on me that the biggest advantage that these 15 to 30 year olds are going to have is that the inspired generalists among them will simply know a great deal more than any previous generation in the history of the human race. The technology of the Internet has granted them easy access to much of the Knowledge Of The World and a toolkit to explore it quickly, widely and deeply. By doing this, they will be empowering their brains to go much farther into the heady world of finding multi-disciplinary solutions for our vast multi-disciplinary challenges. A good brain is good at pattern recognition…. the arena to apply it was just multiplied by a billion billion pages of information. The mind boggles, and that’s a good thing.
So my hat is off to the Gen Y generalists, to our future thought leaders, the crackers of cancer, of Alzheimers, of Global Warming and who knows, of the tribalism, hatred, ignorance, hunger and poverty that afflict our planet every minute of every day.
And to Jeffrey and those like you, I salute you for your dedication to threading your way through all those screens of other people’s thoughts and research. And please also take the time to go sit on a hill every so often and just think about solutions using your unprecedented breadth of knowledge. Remember that Einstein, devoid of an Internet, said “Imagination is more important than knowledge”…. and to that add the thought that if your base of knowledge is exponentially larger, your thinking outside the box of the present, your invention of new solutions, new paradigms, the unprecedented path forward every which way, will truly be a wonder to behold. So please keep reading the Internet Jeff, and go even wider and deeper. I expect great things from you and your friends. And thank you for the ennobling burst of optimism you deliver about our future. The New York Times guy hasn’t met you, and he’s completely wrong. Si, se puede.
It started as a dinner table joke. A year or so ago, I noticed that there appeared to be no topic that could be mentioned, certainly if it was anywhere in the sciences, where I knew more than Jeffrey. And I’m 56 and he’s 17. As I pride myself on having been alert, inquisitive and an addicted reader of everything in sight for at least 40 years, this seemed quite odd. So I’ve been studying Jeffrey like a kind of anthropologist and have reached the conclusion that Something Very Big is going on all of a sudden, and it is a seismic shift in culture and society that will soon give the lie to Mr. Schwartz’s negativity. In fact, I think it indicates that an unprecedented wave of progress and improvement will soon be upon us, led by young people like Jeffrey who right now are still teenagers.
OK, so he hasn’t actually read the entire Internet. He’s trying, but it is rather too big for even the autodidactic brainiac who is my son. But I’m telling you that, no kidding, since he was ten years old, this young man has spent around four hours a day, 365 days a year, reading the Internet. And interestingly, very little of this seems to have been distractive entertainment. No, it appears as though he’s been methodically reading just about everything he could access without a password in the widest possible aspects of all the applied sciences and beyond and through them in politics, sociology and generally The World We Live In. And I calculate he’s been reading the Internet so far for about ten thousand hours. I’m not kidding: do the math. And not only has he made that personal investment in the combined online output of two millennia of intellectual writing, but he has wired himself online into a substantial network of deep thinkers, including a bunch of PhD’s as well as abundant other young people who are also reading the knowledge base we call the Internet. And they are endlessly discussing seriously deep stuff online and often as a result face to face.
So what is going on here? Well, apparently, and only in the last decade, we have abolished geography as an impediment to learning. When I used to sit in the Cambridge University Library, which is a mandated Copyright Library that contains as a result pretty much every book you could ever want to read, I was still at a serious disadvantage in acquiring knowledge as against Jeffrey sitting in his teenager’s bedroom in West Los Angeles. First of all, I had to know what I was looking for, so there were few random serendipitous discoveries of tangential knowledge: The professor gave you a list, you went and found the books and you read them. Every so often, you’d use the bibliography in book A to go onwards under your own steam to book B, but mostly, you just read the suggested books to go deeper into your subject. And you pretty much had to start the book at the beginning and read it through to find the relevant stuff. Me, mostly I knew in advance what I wanted to find out, I found it, I read it and left the building.
Not Jeffrey. His reading of the Internet has a whole different methodology and it has little to do with school curricula, assigned reading and “How To Ace the ACT and SAT”. He takes care of those for sure, but he left them behind long ago as a sole basis for his reading. Instead, he has many advantages that I never had: He can word search. He can hyper-click. He can read ten things at a time in ten open windows. He can search the whole massive, aggregate chunk of human knowledge that exists on the Internet by concept and he can meet and discuss it as he sees fit, often with the author, often with others with common interest in the material. He is sitting in a virtual University Library, but with all the books open at once, and with the aisles full of interested parties in one seamless, endless seminar or teach-in, a kind of exogenous brain of all the knowledge of the world. And he's a Rising Senior in high school. Go figure.
I don’t think this has ever been possible before in the ten millennia of human intellectual development. And it makes me a pretty huge optimist as young people like Jeffrey grow up and start asserting themselves intellectually, in politics, as scientists, as thought-leaders and as citizens of the world. And I suspect they might even rescue us from the dysfunctions of old-style democracy.
Consider if you will, the mind of Henry the Eighth, king of Great Britain. Some five centuries ago, he was much more than a womanizer and beheader of inconvenient wives. He was very, very smart…. but that alone did not make him a great leader. The thing was that he knew pretty much everything a human being could know in that place, at that time. When he met with his military advisors, he knew as much as them about the art and science of warfare. When he met with agricultural experts, he was their match in knowing all about farming. His understanding of the weather was as good as anyone else’s he could consult. In fact, in the twenty separate and unrelated areas of knowledge important for a king to make a decision, important for him to be a great leader, he was a world expert, all on his own. He did not always get things right, leaders never do, but he had the huge advantage of being able to process all available resources of knowledge inside his own head, and on the fly. No need for a whole bunch of committee meetings for Henry.
Now think of a modern day leader. Let’s use Bill Clinton in the White House, not because of some other unfortunate similarities to Henry the Eighth, but because when we add in Al Gore as Vice-President, even President Clinton’s most ardent opponents should concede that the two of them together had Very Big Brains at work. They had the Rhodes Scholar intellect we want at work in the White House. But for good or bad, the world in which they operated was one heck of a lot more complicated than in Henry’s simpler age.
And why? Precisely because Henry was pretty much the last leader who could Know Everything Available. Since then, the database of human knowledge has grown exponentially every year…. call it the intellectual parallel to Moore’s Law…. but the poor old human brain has remained exactly the same size, operating at the same speed, with the same mental processes dealing with all the information. So that even the smartest among us until recently have had to go deeper and deeper in order to be an expert in anything at all. But importantly, in order to do so with those same-sized brains, we’ve had to go narrower and narrower. I was joking with the radiologist recently who analyzed the scans of my knee. “How are knees” I asked, “more or less interesting than elbows?” “Oh”, he replied “I don’t do elbows these days. I’m the knee man here”. I was relieved that he confirmed he did actually do both left and right knees, and I took some great comfort from the fact that he must be really good at knees if that’s all he did professionally.
The problem however is obvious: Life is Not Knees. And the colossal challenges that face our civilization are intrinsically multi-disciplinary. If the fixed size of the brain’s traditional capacity to learn has remained static, how can we ever hope to conquer those hellaciously complicated problems that involve twenty disciplines, all of whose experts are in intellectual silos: deep but very, very narrow? And especially when human nature makes grown-ups invariably believe their own silo is more important, more compelling, than all those other silos they little understand.
Well, corporations and governments have taken different stabs at that precise problem over time, with mixed success. Our President has a Cabinet of specialized leaders reporting to him or her. The hope is that they will each know more than the President about their own area of responsibility. In the case of a smart leadership, the Clinton / Gore way to lead was to convene world-class experts and attempt to make them cooperate. But the challenge is that N.I.H. stands for more in such a room than the National Institutes of Health. Though the experts are asked to leave their “Not Invented Here” attitudes at the door, human nature brings them into the room.
When Steven Spielberg and I founded The Starbright Foundation in 1990, we wanted a fearless Campaign Chairman, who would aggressively ask people for big donations to our then fledgling non-profit studio. Kathy Kennedy brilliantly suggest General Norman Schwarzkopf. So off I went to meet him in Tampa. There I was jawing on about how in Starbright we were generalists trying to make a wildly diverse bunch of specialist experts cooperate for the first time to create our special software for sick kids: writers, directors, artists, oncologists, hematologists, psychiatrists…. A set of experts who had never before encountered most of those other experts professionally. And I was saying that our job was to be the generalists in the middle, constantly yanking back the strategy which every expert seemed to want to yank left or right to serve their own narrow silo of expertise. We were the strategic drivers, they were the collaborating resources.
General Schwarzkopf interrupted me: “What do you know about the U.S. Army?” he asked. “Almost nothing” I answered. “Well” he said. “When you join the Army, we don’t just give you a rank. We also give you a Specialty: You are a rifleman or a cook or a driver or a signalman. And we give you a pin that says so. And it does not matter how much we promote you over the years; you still keep your Speciality”.
“Until one day, if you are a damn good leader, we may decide to make you a General. And in the ceremony when you get your Star, we take away your Specialty Pin…. Because you are no longer a Specialist. You are a General”.
I sat there stunned by the enormity of the revelation…. It had never occurred to me before that in an Army, the consequence of failure is death and injury and loss of your defined mission. So you’d better get your act together and put the generalist, the General in charge of the experts.
That’s all well and good, but how are our leaders in any area to possibly possess the necessary knowledge to tame the experts and lead them back to valuing their collaboration with other experts in support of the common mission? How exactly do we do that?
Well, with great difficulty I think! This is arguably now the biggest systemic challenge to the world and to Life As We know It: The leaders know a lot less about each relevant discipline than the experts they must keep in line. Oh dear! Is there hope, and if so, where?
Well, I think it is in Jeffrey Samuelson and, in this country at least, the eighty million other members of Jeff’s Generation Y, the Millennials all around us. It is not only that they are more pro-social, more engaged in their world than any generation in the last three, nor that they are more concerned and more viral in their relationships on and off line.
It dawns on me that the biggest advantage that these 15 to 30 year olds are going to have is that the inspired generalists among them will simply know a great deal more than any previous generation in the history of the human race. The technology of the Internet has granted them easy access to much of the Knowledge Of The World and a toolkit to explore it quickly, widely and deeply. By doing this, they will be empowering their brains to go much farther into the heady world of finding multi-disciplinary solutions for our vast multi-disciplinary challenges. A good brain is good at pattern recognition…. the arena to apply it was just multiplied by a billion billion pages of information. The mind boggles, and that’s a good thing.
So my hat is off to the Gen Y generalists, to our future thought leaders, the crackers of cancer, of Alzheimers, of Global Warming and who knows, of the tribalism, hatred, ignorance, hunger and poverty that afflict our planet every minute of every day.
And to Jeffrey and those like you, I salute you for your dedication to threading your way through all those screens of other people’s thoughts and research. And please also take the time to go sit on a hill every so often and just think about solutions using your unprecedented breadth of knowledge. Remember that Einstein, devoid of an Internet, said “Imagination is more important than knowledge”…. and to that add the thought that if your base of knowledge is exponentially larger, your thinking outside the box of the present, your invention of new solutions, new paradigms, the unprecedented path forward every which way, will truly be a wonder to behold. So please keep reading the Internet Jeff, and go even wider and deeper. I expect great things from you and your friends. And thank you for the ennobling burst of optimism you deliver about our future. The New York Times guy hasn’t met you, and he’s completely wrong. Si, se puede.
____________________________________________________________________
Peter Samuelson is a media executive, producer and pro-social entrepreneur who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children. http://www.samuelson.la/ peter@samuelson.la
Peter Samuelson is a media executive, producer and pro-social entrepreneur who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children. http://www.samuelson.la/ peter@samuelson.la
Labels: 12th grade, double bottom line, Future, Gen Y, Generation Y, high school, Internet, Jeffrey Samuelson, Knowledge, learning, Millennial, MIllennials, peace, poverty, Pro-social, prosocial, Teenagers
posted by Peter Samuelson at
1:51 PM
<< Home