Blinded.

The information age is so dazzling that it is blinding. One sign is the runup of high-tech stocks involving the Internet; almost anything with a dot-com attached seems to have become a kind of Midas gold. Initial public offerings of startup company stock are the latest in a long series of get-very-rich-quick dreams that have escalated through the last half-century: gambling casinos, sweepstakes, state lotteries, tort lawsuits, executive bonuses, and golden parachutes. As I write, the NASDAQ stock index has hit record highs for seven consecutive days.

There are subtler signs, too. There is, for example, the widely held view that the Internet has so vastly increased our access to information that our children will soon be light-years ahead of us. List September, at a seminar on the prospects for humanity in the next millennium, put on by the Foundation for the Future in Seattle, I listened to several prominent scholars marvel at the facility with which their young children now frolic in the sea of knowledge. "It used to be we had to go to the library and look so hard for the right books--but now my kid jumps on the web and in no time he's got a ton of information," said one.

But just how good is that information? The Internet may be loaded and fast (sounds like a used car ad, doesn't it?), but it's also filled with gargantuan amounts of trash. I have the impression that the good information has become much more intermixed with the bad stuff than was the case when we did research in libraries. Recently, that impression got a bit stronger, after I gave a talk in which I mentioned the rising spike of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.

During the question session, a man asked, "wouldn't it grab the public's attention more if instead of pointing to rising [CO.sub.2] we talked about the falling level of oxygen in the air?" I had to confess I didn't know anything about that. A few days later, someone sent me a downloaded bar chart purportedly showing that the Earth's oxygen level had declined from 32 percent of the air "Before" to 15 percent in "Large Cities 1990s" and 10 percent in "Industry cities." It was accompanied by a text that said, among other things, "Don't you wonder why does all that numerous and strange diseases appearing this days?"

I was skeptical, and ran through a few mental "screening" clues. Thirty-two percent? As I understand it, if the concentration of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere had been even a few percentage points higher than the current density of 21 percent anytime in recent millennia, every house, tree, and T-shirt on the planet would have burst into flame. And if it were dropping as sharply as the graph suggested, surely the world's top climate scientists, who have been intensively studying atmospheric composition for the past decade, would have raised some alarm. I wondered: if the author was that careless with words, how careless was he being with his numbers? I looked for sources, but saw none. And finally, as a runner who has competed in long-distance races since the 1950s, I thought about what it would feel like to experience that sharp a decline in the oxygen going into my lungs--and the mere thought confirmed that this graph was junk. But what would have been the reactions of the professor's kid, who--being a k id--presumably would have few such screening clues to work with? The kid might easily decide to write a school report on how the Earth's oxygen is plummeting, and his classmates (and teacher?) might be impressed enough to mention it to others.

That's not to say there aren't some superb resources on the web. But they can be hard to pick out. The flip side of the democratization of information is the lowering of standards of credibility. The World Wildlife Fund or Stanford University can have websites, but so can anyone else. So, we've got people neteasting to the world about how they've been abducted by UFOs, or have done nuclear fusion in their apartments, or have learned that mankind has only been on this planet for 3,000 years. And we have people who--as I write this--say they have proof the world will end on January 1. If you're reading this, they seem to have been mistaken.

Of course, it's not just the Internet that's become a hodgepodge. It's the increasingly indiscriminate nature of the information revolution overall. On TV, the distinctions blur between news and fiction, between politics and celebrity, between critical issues and merely inflammatory ones. It's getting harder to tell, not just what's credible but, indeed, what's real. And even as the distinctions between broad categories of reality blur, so do the finer distinctions drawn by language itself. David Orr, a professor at Oberlin College, notes that the vocabulary of the average 14-year-old in the United States was about 25,000 words in 1950, but has declined to 10,000 words today. Says Orr: "This is not merely a decline in numbers of words but in the capacity to think."

The information explosion, then, is having paradoxical effects. Because distinctions are blurring, thinking is blurring. Witness the Kansas Board of Education's inability to distinguish science from religious doctrine; witness the U.S. Senate's rejection of the nuclear test ban treaty because the Senators' animosity for Bill Clinton so infuriated them that they lost sight of their responsibility for the future of human life. Witness the rash of recent cases in which reporters hungry for attention have injected inflammatory fiction or fantasy into their reporting: the New Republic writer who reported outrageous quotes he had only imagined and never heard; the on-line magazine Salon publishing a scurrilous rumor (later spliced into a hot-selling book) about George W. Bush getting arrested on crack cocaine charges. Because anybody can be heard, the people who have the most celebrity or notoriety, or who are most glitzy or outrageous, are heard most--and those who are most thoughtful or careful are often not hea rd at all.

At the Foundation for the Future seminar, a few of us were asked to comment on the greatest threats we face in the next millennium. Christian de Duve, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine, said, "I think the greatest threat to humanity is the excessively rapid growth of knowledge." Our knowledge is overwhelming our wisdom, in other words; we are creating new technologies and rushing them into use before we can even begin to understand what their impacts will be. We seem not to learn from the past haste with which we rushed to use such inventions as DDT, thalidomide, breast implants, asbestos insulation, lead-based house paint, nuclear power plants, ozone-depleting CFCs--and on and on. None of them proved necessary. For all we have found benign replacements.

Dc Duve's perception was that of a scientist worried about what techno-optimists--the people rushing to the NASDAQ--are likely to do as they try to turn the powers of biotech, nanotech, and infotech to maximum profit as quickly as they can. But the problem may be even more basic than that. As the avalanche of information gains speed, were losing our capacity to make distinctions--a capacity that in all animals has proved essential to evolutionary adaptation and survival. To stem this loss, we need urgently to redesign our educational systems, not by simply plugging more kids into the Internet, but by giving kids more tools for screening and evaluating the stuff they're plugged into. Kids need to be taught how to distinguish between an ad, a spin, and a fraud; between a cause-effect relationship, a correlation, and a coincidence; between an observation, a deduction, and a logical fallacy; between history, historical fiction, and myth. And if the messages don't give them enough identifying marks to make those distinctions possible (or if the identifications are too often false), then we need broadiy sanctioned societal standards--whether self-regulated by responsible industries or enforced by government. Just as the invention of the web browser brought some order to the chaos of Internet searching, we need new tools to evaluate the quality of the information being dredged up.

If kids don't develop the capability to make these distinctions as children; they'll make dangerous investors and technicians as adults. They'll be like deer transfixed by headlights--easy prey for hunters, or likely victims of collision. One reason so many deer are slaughtered on the roads is that they haven't had a few millennia of experience that would have selected for the traits of car-avoidance. Cars and guns have appeared on the scene in an evolutionary eyeblink. But so, now, have biotech and nanotech and infotech--and as we enter the new millennium, these bright new inventions have us humans dangerously transfixed. We need to learn, and to teach our children, not to dash into the middle of every new highway we come to. My guess is that the human traits most likely to survive the coming millennia will not be those that most aggressively seek greater knowledge and control, but those that lead us to most thoughtfully weigh the meaning of the knowledge we already have.