Column A and Column B

I recently took the GRE. Again. I think I was hoping that by some stroke of luck, the gods would show their favor and grant me the knowledge I needed to ace the darn thing without studying. You can imagine what happened. Returning from the whole ordeal quite frustrated, I was pleasantly surprised with the slightly vindicating lecture given in my Computers and Ethics in Society class on “The Orders of Ignorance.” I quickly concluded that, while I could feel the strain of first-order ignorance many times during the GRE, I was rarely allowed to show my capacity with second- or third-order ignorance problems, which meant that the test did not show a true characterization of my intellect.

Which is funny, now that I think about it...

In Thomas Friedman’s "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century" (which is neither brief nor a complete history), the author describes the “flattening” of the world as the product—and future—of the 21st century. With a thorough flattening, businesses will perfect the practices of outsourcing, insourcing, and off-shoring. Technology and businesses will spread to other countries in an entirely symbiotic relationship.

Why is this so funny? Well, let’s look at the future of the flattened world. If Friedman is right, the world is progressing on a course of ultimate flatness. Eventually, open-source software will rule, putting money-hungry companies like Microsoft into the dust. Outsourcing for super-giants like Wal-Mart will be taken to an extreme: having completely exhausted the supply of cheap labor in developing nations, they will turn to robotic labor, which is both cheap and entirely obedient. Because of global expansion and the need for a unified language, the "one tongue to rule them all" will incorporate major sounds from every culture on this planet. When everything seems like it’s running the smoothest, the South Africans will suddenly realize nobody can pronounce their favorite clicking words. The wealthy Singaporean doctors will realize they’ve been replaced in the operating room by a twenty-dollar automated surgeon. Soon even the open-source programmers formerly playing with projects in their "spare time" will realize that, upon loosing their day job at the industry giant, they’ve been forced to take three part-time jobs flipping burgers at McDonalds (the only company who refused to hire robots).

Looking back on this madness, the world will see that while standardized testing like the GRE has the intention of providing an even playing ground for everyone, it only serves the purpose of making everyone homogenous. What the world really needs is not an enormous department store selling everything as cheap as it can get. Nor does it want every computer be a Dell because they can ship them the fastest. What it needs, instead, is innovation. A grocery store that sells only eggs because that’s its specialty. A computer store that sells computers of such high quality it can only make a few in a year. And especially, the world needs individuals who, on occasion, can see how the information displayed in “Column A” really is greater than “Column B” even though the practice GRE says otherwise.

That’s why I’m going into academics.