I love technology. Gadgets are great. I think we are lucky in so many ways to be living now, with the vast amount of life-saving, world-shrinking, information-at-our-fingertips tech that only 50 years ago would have been seen as science fiction.
I have in my pocket a smartphone that has more computing power than that of the first craft to land men on the moon (if you think that was a conspiracy, get your coat, there’s the door, don’t let the internet hit you on the ass on the way out) and I can use it to have a live video chat, at any time, with somebody on the other side of the planet. For free.
We have enormous machines that are smashing together the building blocks of matter at incredible energies to find out what’s in there. We are able to peer into the furthest reaches of the observable universe to probe the moments after the Big Bang. We can image the inside of the human body in such detail that we can diagnose illness and disease more and more accurately, pushing up our life expectancy in the process.
So why do I genuinely see people walking along, nose glued to the screen of their iPad, jumping and waving their fists when they are narrowly missed by the car that so inconveniently wants to drive on that road they’ve wandered onto? Why do I see people repeatedly trying to feed a ticket into a closed barrier that clearly has a big red ‘X’ displayed on it, while the one with the big green arrow goes unused?
We are such an intelligent race, but sometimes I despair. Technology is fabulous and shows our ingenuity, but are we in danger of dumbing down, or are we just losing our common sense, if we put ever more reliance on them?
I’ve discussed many times the fact that nobody remembers telephone numbers anymore. When I was growing up, many moons ago, you memorised all of the important numbers you needed. Home, your best friend, family, and that was it. The rest went in a little book. Nobody had mobile phones (yes, I’m that old, and if you’re not that just makes me feel older), so you remembered the landlines you needed to and always carried 10p just in case. Nowadays we have mobiles, cloud storage and a contacts list that still contains the garage you had your car serviced at three cars ago, in a different county. Nobody can remember all that, but we don’t have to.
Often the retort to that is that we’ve just shifted our focus. Go online today and the chances are you’ll have to login to something. Every time you want to buy something on the web you have to sign up for an account, to receive a newsletter you’ll never read, or news of a product you’ll never buy, and that means another password. We have passwords everywhere we turn, so how can we be dumbing down? But passwords are the telephone numbers of years gone by. You have a few important ones for the things you log in to all the time and the rest you’ll never remember. Some people may echo the past and write them down in a little book (frowned upon, you can’t trust anyone, what are you thinking?) but I’m willing to bet the majority of you recycle the same password over and over again (OMG, you might as well throw open your doors and invite the criminals waiting just outside to take whatever they want!).
Satellite navigation devices (sat-navs from here on, I’m not made of letters) are another prime example of technology making us lazy. I have one. I have three apps on my phone that do it. Using them I don’t have to worry about pulling out a map-book, finding the right page, locating the right spot and then tracing backwards through possibly numerous other pages to my starting location. I just tap in a postcode, press go and follow. Fab, have a biscuit.
The thing is, the next time I need to go to that place I have to pull out the sat-nav, tap in the postcode, press go and follow. Again. And the next time. Back in the days of using the map-book or street atlas I wouldn’t have had to do that as I’d have been taking notice of where I was going and likely (maybe) reading the road signs. Need to go there again? Fine, I’ve been there before so no problem. Now? Blindly follow the instructions and hope you don’t drive into a river that it thinks is a motorway.
How many times have you started the sat-nav while you’re still on the bit of the route that you know and shouted at the screen when it tried to take you a really bizarre way? I have personally been taken off at a motorway junction, across the roundabout at the top of the slip road and straight back down onto the same motorway. It was highly amusing…the first two times (to be clear, it was a long motorway and the sat-nav tried this several times on the one journey, I didn’t repeat this trip after trip).
Cars are another thing. There are so many safety features and gadgets on the cars of today that some people don’t even have to remember not to crash into the vehicle in front of them as the car will brake for them. There’s power steering, ABS brakes and a computer to tell you how far you can go before you run out of fuel. There is less and less that we have to do in the process, but what happens when these things aren’t there? We are left without the skills needed to perform the most basic of tasks. The more we turn over to tech the easier things become, but that doesn’t mean they have become less complicated, just that the bulk of it is now hidden from us.
My point is we shouldn’t let ourselves become complacent just because we have a wonderful piece of technology that can do the job (sometimes better, sometimes not). Gadgets are great tools when they free up time for us to do something else, but my brain rebels at the thought that we’re not using that time constructively, we’re watching YouTube videos of cats looking cute or looking at photos on Facebook of a distantly remembered ‘friend’ and their dinner.
The world we live in is getting smarter, but that doesn’t by any means mean that we are too. Now that we have the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips, why aren’t we all super-smart? Maybe because we know that we can look it up again if we ever need to, so why go to the trouble of retaining it? There’s disgruntled avians to be catapulted, you know.
I could go on (perhaps I will, another time), but I suspect you’re already itching to use the marvel of engineering and science that you’re reading this on to do something important, like look at how much fat celebrities are carrying today, or slice fruit (if only you ate that much fruit!).
I will finish by sending a couple of messages: to the person glued to the iPad above, yes, it’s a brilliant piece of technology that allows you to do so much, but there’s a time for using it and I’m pretty certain dodging traffic isn’t it. To the person fruitlessly jamming their ticket again and again into an unresponsive barrier at the station, I have no words, you’re beyond help, please leave the planet at the next stop.
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