Are you smarter than your smartphone?

A great article entitled ‘Our phones may too smart for our own good’ appeared in the Australian ‘Sun-Herald’ over the weekend that hit a nerve with The Insider. Writer, Andrew Daddo, exclaimed, “Intellectually, I understand all the great things this phone (iPhone 4S) and other smartphones can do. The concern is what they’re doing to us. The smarter they get, the dumber we’re letting ourselves become.”

The crux of Andrew’s observations was that we barely have to remember anything any more. Everything we used to remember is milliseconds away courtesy of our smartphones and the access to the internet they provide via mobile broadband networks. Phone numbers? Forget them, they are only a button press away, or if you have Siri, a spoken name away.

Not sure where you are and how to get to where you want to go to? Easy, ask your smartphone. Want to check your astrology to see if it’s safe to get there, find a date, make a reservation for anything from a restaurant to an international flight? Use your smartphone. Not sure how to spell a word, treat a snake bite, cook an omelet, fly a plane, get statistics, settle an argument, buy a car or fix anything? Don’t worry, it’s all there in the palm of your hand.

What knowledge we used to store in our brain cells is now in our cell phones. We are, in essence, being ‘dumbed down’ and we don’t even realize it. As Andrew puts it so succinctly – “global dumbing could be as bad as global warming!”

Even more frightening is that we are preferring to communicate via these devices rather than talking face to face with another human beings. Instant messaging and social networking (which should be renamed ‘anti-social networking’) are replacing our basic skills of communicating with voice and visual contact. Facebook dependence via mobiles has reached epidemic proportions in markets like Indonesia and Thailand prompting calls for its control before the fabric of village social life is replaced by global virtuality (if there such a word).

Don’t get me wrong, I like my smartphone but I’m scared of it. Like Facebook, I fear being swallowed up and losing what basic human intellectual traits I have spent years nurturing. Worse still, my smartphone is proving to be much smarter than me, remembering appointments and passwords I have no chance of remembering. The last straw for me will be an app that gives me the name, company and job title of someone I am about to run into at a conference, as this is a skill I have long lost.

Oh no, big brother can also find where I am at any time, Apple already does that under the guise of its ‘Find my iPhone’ app. Maybe it’s time for some enterprising device maker to come up with a ‘dumbphone’ that’s less smart than you or can be controlled to be as smart as you want it to be.

However, what I fear most is that some hostile power may work out how to freeze all smartphones and jam all mobile networks at the same time, rendering the populations of most developed economies brain-dead and useless. Oh dear, the fear has now turned to paranoia!