IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 66

either choice is possible. The laws
of physics may be different at very
small and very large scales than the
ones that operate at human scale
so human neurobiology may not
be governed by the familiar rules
of physics; or the statistical significance tests may be too weak, rendering most knowledge in social
sciences unreliable.
Education also suffers from
the effects of quantity chasing out
quality. The typical American now
goes through 15 years of education before being eligible for a
reasonable full-time job. Online
education is starting to challenge
the monopoly of universities, their
high cost, and their operations, but
not the content of education or the
length of it. There seems to be a
near-consensus that more education is always better, and increasingly essential for a high-tech
society, irrespective of the content
of that education. But most of our
education is not about skills necessary for a high-tech complex
society, but increasingly about intellectual debates over social and
philosophical issues. Such debates
dominate the liberal arts education, and they are justified as building skills of critical thinking, as
opposed to disseminating known
and undisputed facts and skills for
jobs. These debates generate a lot
of information, yet provide no obvious solutions, or even methodologies to arrive at solutions, so their
quality is suspect. Every student is
expected to think for themselves
and reach their own conclusions.
The education merely gives you
some frameworks to clarify and
classify the problem and possibly
make some cogent arguments, with
no obvious resolution of the issues.
One such loud and aggressive
debate is between science and religion about the origins of the universe. In fact, neither has anything

useful to say about the origins of
the universe, and ironically that
only encourages debate and generates a large quantity of information. Scientific discovery of the Big
Bang Theory and the expanding
universe, as interesting as they are,
say nothing about the origin of the
universe, unless one can take an
arbitrary moment in the history of
the universe and call it the beginning. The Big Bang Theory requires
the existence of mass before it, and
the existence of anything before
the beginning suggests that it is
not the beginning. Religions suffer
from the same logical folly. They
explain the universe in terms of a
creator, but the existence of a creator before the beginning suggests
that it was not the beginning, but
an arbitrary moment in its history.
In fact, the concept of a "beginning" is not explainable using our
existing human constructs, yet the
amount of information generated
from debates between alternative
theories fill our libraries and school
curricula. A debate between alternative theories often obscures the
shortcomings common to all the
proposed alternatives, but emphasizes the information that distinguishes between those theories.
Shortcomings that are common to
all are often much more useful to
understanding, yet they are driven
out by the quantity of information
produced by debate in the name of
critical thinking [24].
Similar debates dominate the
theories explaining the beginning
of life where life is defines as selfreplicating organisms. Science and
religion are once again adversaries,
and neither has a satisfactory explanation. Scientific theory of evolution
says nothing about the beginning
of life, since evolution requires the
existence of self-replicating organisms, and as such cannot explain
how they came into existence.
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

There are attempts to explain the
beginning of life in terms of accidental chemical reactions. But that
explanation relies on intrinsic characteristics of the elements comprising the earth, but since we don't
know how the matter was created,
that merely explains one unknown
in terms of another. Accident theories merely defer the explanation of
biology to chemistry of elements,
whose origins are also not known.
Religions also refer to a creator to
explain life, but the creator is typically imagined as a life form, but if
life forms existed before the beginning of life, then it cannot be the
beginning. All such theories explain
one unknown in terms of other
unknowns, and create huge quantities of information, without answering any fundamental questions [24].

Obsolescence
French poet Paul Valery wrote in
1895: "Western cultures worship
information as if it were an omnipotent beast and place no limits on
what they seek to know. The Chinese by contrast do not wish
to know too much, because they
understand that knowledge must
not increase endlessly. If it continues to expand, it causes endless
change, and creates a need to
adjust and abandon age-old traditions and wisdom. You are better
off ignorant than stricken with the
European disease of constant invention and change, and the debauchery of endless confusion from new
ideas" [1]. Paul Valery may have
discovered a fundamental paradox
of human existence, which goes
well beyond the European culture.
Humans throughout history appear
to have constantly sought to learn
more about nature, and use that
knowledge to exploit nature to serve
human needs. But such information
is costly to produce, since nature
does not reveal its secrets easily.
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december 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015