The 'Smart Age'
This is the ‘Smart age’ where we are surrounded by everything ‘smart’. We are living in smart homes, donning smart gadgets, smart phones to smart watches to smart eyewear, doing smart work, using smart apps. Addition of word ‘smart’ signifies something trendy, modern, latest, super convenient, requires less effort and is valuable. There was a time when smart was an adjective for human beings but now it is ‘THE’ adjective for all things and products. No doubt it is the humans which are developing these ‘smart’ things and technologies. But, within this sea of ‘smart’ products what has happened to humans. Are we really becoming smarter?
We used to remember many phone numbers by heart, try memorizing a couple, you will realize how difficult it has become. Having everything off the device is easier but nothing can be more handy than having things up our own devices ‘our minds’. Simple calculations used to be oral but now before we realize we reach out for calculators whether virtual or physical, even for smallest of calculations. We no longer want to write anything we can use AI and other tools. We do not want to read we can hear audiobooks. These are just examples. We do not want to do anything. Why? Maybe since we are very used to or we have become too lazy to bother our minds, or apps/ devices have become so handy.
Maybe the bottom line is we do not want to bother our mind much. So, mind being the super computer what will it to? We keep the mind super busy with information bombardment that is fed to us in the form of ads, news, social media content, reels, whatsApp forwards, pod casts etc. In the information consumption process we did not realize that we are making our mind do instead of active work more of ‘passive work’.
And the explanation given is what is there in small calculations, memorizing telephone numbers, and now even reading and writing, we should free ourselves and do more creative work. But how many of us are actually doing real creative work. Since when has the passive exposure to content (ads, news, shopping, reels, tweets, messages, videos based on our research history) categorized as creative work. But that is the whole premise, free the mind from mundane work to do creative work but at the end of the day we are doing even more mundane work which we are not even controlling ourselves.
So, I again ask, have we humans become really smarter? Or few are developing smart apps, algorithms and devices to make us less smart, more controllable, more prone to consuming content, tech, products & services bombarded at us all the time. By just following the trends, the tech, the herd behaviour makes us smarter or otherwise. We need to think about it before we become too passive to even ‘THINK’ and outsource the ‘thinking’ to tech and gadgets. Think about it!