Smart Enough?

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad, but we live in an age where even phones have an IQ (back in the days there were dumb phones, then came the smart ones, and then the smarter ones…now there’s no end to how smart they can get, the only limitation being your budget). We spend hundreds to have ourselves always surrounded by these gizmos. It’s almost as if we pay to let ourselves be lazy. Ofcourse the technical term for it is ‘convenience’.

So when was the last time any of us did a mental calculation of 12 times 16? Wouldn’t we rather reach out for our phone instead? The phone being so smart, would compute it for us in microseconds, add about 5 seconds to type 12X16. Now that’s our money’s worth.

But are the green bills the only price we pay to have so much convenience a click away? Aren’t we providing our own brains less exercise and more stress? We have transferred our brains’ little challenges onto these seemingly convenient and jazzy toys. We are paying to let our phones get smarter while we get stupider.

That being said, there’s no doubt that a machine can never be as intelligent as a human brain. Smart, maybe, but intelligent, never. Even then, we need to perhaps reassess our overdependence on technology. Being intelligent is good, being smart as well, even better.