Smarty Pants Phones
There was a study recently — I know, who believes those anymore? — where college students were tested with smart phones on them, with smartphones in their packs and with smartphones left in an adjacent room. Nobody used them, nobody answered calls, nobody googled anything, but in the end the kids with phones on their person scored worse than the ones with phones in their packs. The highest scores were those of the students whose phones were left in the adjoining room. I would’ve loved to know how kids — if there are any left — would score if they had never owned a smarty phone at all. The conclusion the researchers reached was something on the line that smartphones make us dumber. Since I don’t own a smartphone, you can well imagine my pleasure at learning this. Or, if you’re a slave to the device, you’ll say I’m full of shit and the study was faux science.
I got a buddy, Computer Carl, who was the first guy I knew who bought a GPS. He visited us with it proudly mounted on his dash and we all listened — in amazement — to the female voice in perfect enunciation — command us to turn left, proceed point six miles, turn left again, or if we screwed up, recalculate and order new revised instructions. Carl, being a techie, gleefully obeyed her every edict.
Invariably we’d be driving home down the island and the smarty pants GPS lady would tell him to turn left at the corner where we always go straight, no doubt calculating distance, not time, and Carl, who never remembered the route even after two or three dozen visits and one hundred trips, would turn left. No, I’d say each of those 100 times, go straight, but Carl trusted the GPS more than me, a 40 year resident, and — here’s my point — more than HIS own memory. This is what we’d call now, Google Brain. Why trouble yourself learning and memorizing (and possibly using) that stored information if you can just google it up?
Maybe when I have Alzheimers I’ll have a better answer for that. You know, if I can remember where I put my smarty phone….
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Tags: Do Smartphones Make Us Stupid?, Google Brain, GPS memory loss
Skeeter,
As usual, your story has got me thinking. About a future in which smartphones decide what we do and where we turn, not only with directions while driving like a GPS device, but in other aspects of our life. Say for instance we could install app-lications, like a small computer program right on our phone, and they would keep us connected with friends and news updates and other information. What if these app-lications were controlled by some kind of artificial machine intelligence and algorithm that alerted us to other information, even advertisements it deemed similar to our other preferences?
Then we head into a future presidential election. Future Voters know it makes the most sense to vote for one candidate over the other. But yet, their smartphones tell them all of their friends will vote for this other guy, and they see ad-vertisments saying it’s in THEIR best interests to vote for this other guy.
They walk into the polling station, and know who they should vote for, but their smartphones insistently maintain “NO! Turn here! It’s time for a change! Don’t worry if it looks like your driving off the road and into the ditch! Or off a cliff!”
Will people living in this shiny new Metropolis trust their phones over their own experience? It’s a scary proposition and certainly could never happen in our own lifetime. But what about in days to come, perhaps when robots bag our groceries and drones deliver them through the sky? What about then?
Well, if I were the cynical type, and you know neither of us are of that ilk, I might worry too about such a future, preposterous as it sounds. And if I were paranoid, not that I could imagine myself such, I would figure we’d be the ones bagging the software updates for the robots at the Apple Store in return for free TV that consists of mostly home shopping networks and gameshows and Entertainment Tonight and sports with android players. Luckily, we live in an enlightened democracy ruled by the best and the brightest.