this is gps , the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i m fareed zakaria coming to you from new york. today on the program, what is happening inside putin s russia? is he losing his grip on power? is he at odds with his own commanders? and how might his forces fair against the up coming counter offensive. we ll get inside from julia yoif and andrei soldatov. and since china opened up its economy in 1978, it has averaged almost 10% growth a year. but are we now at peak china? the economy ims keyu jin weighs in. also, has humanity gotten, well, dumber, thanks to the supercomputers in our pockets that could tell us everything that we need to know in an instant. i ll talk to the author simon winchester about the past, present and future of knowledge. but first, here is my take. america s debt ceiling crisis once again provoked the usual commentary about how it shows the country s basically dysfunctional. but the truth is t
how to spell, how to find out where we were and how to know anything. and then initially i thought this is going to make us dumber. it is made us fatter and flabbier, the physical labor saving devices but the mental ones will it make our brains dumber? will it and the ultimate question will it remove the possibility of wisdom from society. because wisdom is a lot of knowledge multiplied by a lot of age. old, wise people. we need them in society. but then i thought, well, wait a minute. maybe what all of the devices are doing is actually purging our brains of the stuff we don t need. because with great respect to the people of south dakota, we don t need to know the capital or the fact that it is called pierre not pierre. it is like holding on a brain under a cold tap and getting unnecessary stuff away. leaving us like plato, and arrogant that might be to say, enable us to think the important things in life. so i m quite optimistic.