The jolt was buried rather far back in the newspaper, given its importance: That once celebrated human activity known as Thought, also known as Thinking, is apparently not that useful after all. And that was that. The adjacent article was on another topic entirely, and the space adjacent to that one was an advertisement for women's shoes.
It was a whimperish exit for a tradition with roots stretching back to Descartes, Plato, and presumably beyond. Had you taken either of those two gentlemen aside—not to mention any of the billion souls who have ever stared up at a star-filled sky and taken a moment or two to mull things over—and told them Thought would one day be downgraded to just another human attribute like hair, or nostrils, or jealousy, they would have called you a liar to your face. Thought is what makes humans human, they would have explained. It's the luminous spark of reason that grants us lordship over the animals, endows us with cell phones, and offers hope, even in our darkest hours, that our species will somehow calculate the way forward to a brighter tomorrow. How could a thing like Thought ever be discredited?
