My house and my car are getting smarter. After replacing a furnace, a water heater, a dishwasher, a car, and a coffee maker, I would give my house a B- on an IQ test. The problem is, the smarter our houses become, the more incompetent we become -- with impunity.
Let's start with the car. It not only signals when you forget to secure your seat belt, it beeps when you get a little close to another object. It probably has some version of the technology used in airplanes, as in "pull up, pull up" when you about to slam into a mountain. The result: you no longer have to master parallel parking since the car guides you through it. Say goodbye to spatial skills. And of course, there's the GPS system. Latitude? Longitude? Who cares? We don't need to read maps; we get our geography by an officious sounding person who lives in a little window on the dashboard. And don't bother kicking the tires; if one of them loses air, you're notified immediately with a dashboard signal.
Of course all of this will be "old tech" when self-driving robotic cars replace current models (Google is testing one now). The only decision we'll have to make -- should we sit in the front seat and pretend we're driving or in the back seat and pretend we have a chauffeur?
Then there's the house. Our new Sears dishwasher has the nerve to flaunt its brilliance. It has two smart settings that calculate the nature of the load and calibrate the wash and dry times and the amount of water needed. It even has the audacity to say "complete" when the cycle is finished as opposed to simply "clean." So I no longer need to think of the dishwasher as a giant jigsaw puzzle where every piece fits. Goodbye to logistics. The good news is that after reviewing the tome-like manual, you can convince yourself that you're the next Mark Zuckerberg as you "program" your appliance.
I wonder what a child growing up in a smart house will be like. What they will learn? Cooking? No need when you can nuke prepared meals from any supermarket. Cleaning? Get the Roomba! Typing? Every new device "fixes" typos automatically, and you don't need to know grammar or spelling with spell check. Calculators, Excel spreadsheets, interactive tools -- all do the math for you, so learning basic arithmetic is a waste of time.
Even music has been "technified." Karaoke apps turn "mouthers" into Alicia Keyes or Sinatra by changing off-key notes to on. Guitar hero, Virtuoso Free (piano), and Beat Beat Play (drums) all make tone-deaf wannabes into Bruce Springsteen. But like other technology, they give users the false sense of being good at something even though they can't carry a tune or read music.
There's a mobile app for almost anything you may want to do, any situation you confront. Just because Jon Huntsman speaks Chinese, doesn't mean you can't understand him. Just use your translation app, and you'll never have to invest in Rosetta Stone and actually learn how to speak or write the language. If you can't figure out which language app to download on your smart phone, just let the artificially intelligent iDecide make the call for you. Then you can start sucking your thumb. And if you do regress to baby status, your parents can lull you to sleep with a terrific bedtime story, courtesy of a "create your own fairy tale app."
The problem with all of this brilliant technology is that it's lulling us into the national delusion that we're better at things than we really are. That delusion might not seem important if the global economy weren't nipping at our heels and challenging Americans to be smarter, faster, more rigorous and more aware that other countries are beginning to beat us at our game.
That game will likely be available for download on your smarter than smart phone.
Follow Jacqueline Leo on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@jackieleo
When technology doesn't take care, the mind has to do the right thing. but if the mind is mostly on autopilot, there will be a dumbing down. Yeah, funny, but true.- Szar
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You're kidding right?
''are beginning to beat us'' You meant: 'have been beating us for years.''
''at our game.'' No, That is over for good. Finito. It is ''the game'' now.
Try finding a decent non-tech description of what a URL is. Is this one?
'' Abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator (URL) it is the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web.
The first part of the address is called a protocol identifier and it indicates what protocol to use, and the second part is called a resource name and it specifies the IP address or the domain name where the resource is located.
The protocol identifier and the resource name are separated by a colon and two forward slashes.
For example, the two URLs below point to two different files at the domain pcwebopedia.com. The first specifies an executable file that should be fetched using the FTP protocol; the second specifies a Web page that should be fetched using the HTTP protocol:
ftp://www.pcwebopedia.com/stuff.exe
http://www.pcwebopedia.com/index.html
Almost everyone uses a computer yet not everyone knows how to actually type. I’ve met people who cannot use a manual, hand-held calculator or read an analog clock. I know very few people who can drive a car with a manual transmission and someone once complained they had gotten a ticket on the interstate because they couldn’t maintain a steady speed since the cruise control was broken. I don’t know the last time I heard some kids say they were going to play football and it didn’t involve a disc with John Madden in the title. Heck, I notice it in myself since I discovered Google. My brain doesn’t need to remember things so well when I can just look them up.
Not trying to sound like the old man whining about back in his day, but over-reliance on technology will inevitably lead to a loss of manual skills. One of the causes of the ‘obesity epidemic’ is that more and more jobs only require on to sit at a computer desk. I’m no exception; I’ve gained 30 lbs since I moved from an assembly line job to sitting at a desk. Don’t get me wrong; I love me some technology as much as anybody, but I also recognize patterns around me.
an old Guy..................Texting is for the Kids !
Seems like America is having serious troubles, maybe Freedom might work ?
Tech appears to be a rather large Ponzi Scheme. Ditto Big Government. Apple makes all it's
equipment in a Gulog in China ? Federal Government cannot pay off it's Debts.
We are going to pay a price for our adventures in recklessness ?
Buy American, stay at home and get out of Debt !
The premise of this article, followed to its "logical" conclusion, leads us to every "OMG THE ROBOTS ARE REBELLING" scary/apocalyptic "why were we SO LAZY?" sci-fi movie ever made.
I'll stick to my finger counting/mind maths; my old manual five-speed, non-talking car, my non-computerized dishwasher, my own silly off-key singing in the car (and the shower, whatever), and my actual paper books (UGH and my freaking Kindle Fire, LOL) with real words, arranged grammatically, punctuated and spelled correctly. Er, and dictionary.com when I get stuck :)
Good article. Fun, funny, but makes some salient points.
But like I said, parents have to be responsible, and who knows if that will happen.