Outsourcing Our Brains

From the August 2016 issue of The Rotarian

When I tell people I grew up in Palo Alto, Calif. – the epicenter of Silicon Valley – they tend to assume that I was born with a silver iPod in my mouth.

But back in the 1970s, Palo Alto was a sleepy college town. The big innovation of my boyhood was a gizmo that Alissa Fox once brought in for show and tell. It performed four basic math functions and displayed the result on a tiny LCD screen. We regarded the calculator as nothing short of a miracle.

When I tell my own kids about the devices I used throughout childhood – the phones bolted to the wall, the typewriters, the dense volumes of the encyclopedia – they listen with a certain pitying incredulity, as if I were describing the customs of early hominids roaming the Serengeti for edible tree bark.

And who can blame them? My oldest daughter was handed an iPad in first grade, as was her brother two years later. They speak to Siri as if she were an old friend. Granted, they are often asking Siri what it sounds like when a duck farts, then laughing hysterically. But still.

The point is that they are growing up in a world where hand-held devices offer immediate answers to practically any question or dilemma that may arise in their lives. They don’t see this as strange or troubling.

I do.