The Yoke of Cell Phones and Other Technology

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I tried to have casual conversations with my peers at the cafeteria, but all of them looked uninterested. It was a very awkward situation, and I didn’t know what else to do besides going on my cell phone.

What a sad world we live in! Everyone is yoked to their cell phones and other technology instead of shooting the breeze when it’s appropriate - like at the dinner table.

I don't know. Every time we have these big advances in technology there's a bunch of people saying it's a mistake and we were better off before.

I never thought I'd be one of those people. I was so excited by this tech as a young man, the web felt like my natural home. The smartphone fulfilled every childhood fantasy I had of what the future would look like.

But now a lot of it does make me feel queasy. I believe the web will become unusable, there'll be so much disinformation and AI-generated content that nothing will have any value. It'll just be computers generating content and bots talking to each other about the computer generated content. We're almost there already.

I think phones are changing how our brains work and that's troubling. We're outsourcing so much of what our brains used to do to these handheld brains. I predict the human brain will be measurably smaller in a few generations time - assuming we can sustain this technological revolution, which is a big assumption.

The thing is, because we have such easy access to near infinite information it feels like we're getting smarter. But I don't think we are.

I think we're getting impatient. Technology has taught us that things should happen instantly. I think this is driving societal unrest. We expect things in the real world to happen on computer time and then when they don't, we get frustrated. I think that's at least partially behind the rise of populism such purports to offer fast solutions to problems. Dialogue, debate, reasoning - all these things take time and a such are suspect.

So yeah, essentially, I agree.

I feel like even in the context of the original post cellphones have been a mixed blessing.

I can usually manage small talk in person so I don't really like how the impact being described.

Although I can also it being a positive for people who struggle with or dislike small talk because they make it less taboo to not feel obliged to participate in it. The real problem might be how many people only engage in it out of a sense of expectation/obligation.

I believe society will eventually meet a healthy equilibrium on this issue though.