Is Powerpoint Addiction America's National Malady?

Earlier this week the NYT ran an excellent story on the war in Afghanistan “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Powerpoint”.

We’re certain that a similar slide could be created to visualize the complexities of global diplomacy.

In a literal attack on Powerpoint thinking — a BIG beef here at AOC — Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina: “PowerPoint makes us stupid.”

Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

The silo thinking demanded in a Powerpoint takes no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

The NYT story is circulating widely on the Internet and is surely applicable to numerous other areas of America’s business and intellectual capital.

Powerpoint thinking illustrates our greatest concern about primarily men developing our future artificial intelligence thinking. If robot brains run on Powerpoint thinking, the world will surely self-destruct.