HOW WE DIE A THEORY OF EVERYTHING

With few exceptions, struggling companies die alone. The same is probably true of species. No anguished, last minute howling into the wind. We are, after all, just one in a long line? — an estimated 5 Billion different kinds of creatures who have walked, trotted, waltzed, galloped, swum, slithered — or flown — since the Earth cooled. $4.95 Billion of us already extinct.

Is it our turn now? It would be a cosmic kindness for us not to know — while what we do know walks, trots, waltzes, gallops, swims, slithers and flies away.

A hundred and twenty years ago, most folks could ride a horse, steer a buggy. The aptly named horseless carriage quickly destroyed those skills. Horse riding now for jockeys, kids with ponies, polo players. But almost everyone can drive a car — which, in a familiar refrain — is rapidly becoming #driver-less.

Generally available pocket calculators didn’t exist until the 1970s. It took a while for us to dumb down, but the waiting staff at a restaurant recently proved unable to divide a bill for $170 into two equal halves. It took a huddle — and three or four minutes on an iPad — to confirm my dubious $85 answer was indeed correct.

We know #NAPLAN’s results for math have been getting worse every year since the much hated testing began. About 30% of 15-year-olds are below the minimum standard — a benchmark so low that — for a third of our kids— adding up and dividing are now forever out of reach — unless a computer, spreadsheet or iPad are immediately to hand.

Texting, Twitter and Social Media have performed the same bloodless lobotomy on another dying skill — our ability to express ourselves in writing. Twitter’s 280 character limit, including spaces — eliminates any thought-bubble that cannot be summarised — or more often, expanded — into a couple of sentences. Texting — eviscerated of vowels and punctuation — in an inarticulate photo finish for last.

Can grunts and cave paintings be far away? One in seven Australians (14%) have very poor #literacy skills and one in three (30%) have literacy skills low enough to make them vulnerable to unemployment and social exclusion, according to the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth. No wonder many airport bookshops are stripped of all but a handful of titles.

Google has wielded the same scalpel on knowledge. No point holding information in our increasingly empty heads when the answer is a simple: “Hey Siri” away.

Less and less in our brain means rapidly shredding ability to detect patterns — a key element of intelligence and the core of most IQ tests. This in perfect lockstep with our enthusiastic abandonment of #merit — and its Siamese Twin — experience — as important, or even desirable qualifications for the workforce.

The Queensland Government late last year dumped merit as a central consideration for employing any of the State’s 251,000 public servants. More recently, they abandoned merit for First Nations job candidates.

#QueenslandUniversityofTechnology, has also doubled down on its plans to remove references to "merit" from its academic hiring policy. Vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil explained the new approach would factor in gender, ethnicity, and departmental balance.

“Trying to get a merit score – that was very hard to apply in any kind of serious modern contemporary recruitment,’’ she said straight-faced. It would be churlish to note QUT’s own website boasts it has now risen to the dizzy heights of 199th best in the world —slogging it out with the University of Macau, and Estonia’s University of Tartu — both of whom also made the Top 250.

Curiously, merit has not yet been abandoned for jobs like airline pilot, surgeon, parachute instructor, athlete, engineer or barrister — although the legal roosters of the Victorian bar recently defeated a proposed “diversity clause” which would have set level pegging between the administration of justice, and the fashionable requirement for a diverse and inclusive membership”.

Also semaphoring our decline into extinction, the pronounced lack of enthusiasm of the world’s women to have children. In Australia the average female now has 1.63. In China 0.79 — slightly more than one third the number required to keep the population exactly as it is. There are economic explanations for #lowbirthrates — but fewer and fewer children is clearly bad news.

Inflaming this existential risk to the human species — the growing #apartheidbetweenthesexes, where any sexual accusation is socially fatal for the accused, whether a court eventually finds him or her — but mostly him — guilty or not.

Equally worrying, the atomisation of society into an ever growing number of war-paint factions — each fighting, for dominance, not equality — it’s public statement Press Release camouflage. Witness the #AustralianDiversityCouncil, who thoughtfully publish the make-up of their own pay-roll — 82% female, 32% disabled, 20% LGBTIQ+ and one employee in 11 male.

And let’s not forget #ArtificialIntelligence, whose shadow looms over our long homo sapien reign. It’s only ability so far: to absorb oceans of information and detect patterns increasingly invisible to our own increasingly empty minds. Smart, in other words. Smarter than us.

Is this how it ends? Fewer and fewer human beings. Dumber and dumber. Merit out the door. Boys and girls — eyeing each other sadly from opposite sides of a heavily mined no man’s land.

And #74genders — latest count — jostling for the top branch of a tree artificial intelligence is digitally chainsawing to the ground.

I’m #philackman and this #philackmanarticle first to air on #cairnsfm891