Learning/thinking were things that occurred long before machines. Much of the thinking of the past makes what passes for thinking today pale in comparison. In short, we are doing less thinking and more inputting to access “stuff”. Using machines can help us solve the [relatively] simple problems of life (where is Ohio, how do you solve a quadratic equation), but it can’t help us solve “the issues of life.” And where will we be when we no longer have the mental functionality to evaluate the problems we face today?
Look at the candidates we’ve nominated/elected today and the troubles they’ve gotten us into. Are their presence on the political scene the inability of people to access information or to understand the implications of the information they access?
Doing things in an unnecessarily hard way doesn’t make one’s thinking better. If anything it makes it worse, because you’re wasting effort, which certainly isn’t going to help one with the “issues of life”.
You blame the wrong side of the equation when you complain about who has been nominated lately. Look at the rest of the pool. Really when was the last time somebody truly worth nominating even bothered to run? Certainly the last 2 presidential pools were nothing but dead enders I couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm for. It’s not the voters’ fault when a bad candidate comes out of a pool of bad candidates. There is an interesting question there on why nobody worth a crap runs for office anymore, but maybe it’s a good thing, maybe all the smart people have figured out that politics is a terrible job and are in the work force actually producing.