Think

 

"DENKE"

"PENSEZ"

"THINK"

Back in the good old days (or you may think of them as "the bad old days") when IBM Ruled The Earth and dinosaurs were cooled with chilled ammonia, it was possible for an IBM employee to order (free of charge) from the Great Parts Depot in Mechanicsburg, PA, a desk sign proclaiming "THINK", and you could get them in almost every language known to man and in any of the four primary IBM colors: blue, mustard, black, and carmine.

Those of us in IT (Information Technology) used to have a mantra: "Machines should work; people should think."  We tried desperately then to do the required thinking so that our machines could do the required working, and I think (!) that we were largely successful.  I don't know who originated the tenet, but it was clear to all of us then that it was divinely ordained truth.  "Machines should work; people should think."

This evening while walking Riqui The Wonder Dog it occurred to me that there is more truth contained in that mantra than anyone may ever have realized.  In The World To Come machines will do more of the 'working' culminating in a time when machines do everything that constitutes 'work'.  What will be left for us, the living, is everything else: thinking.

If we are not training our children to think, we are training them to be unemployed.