You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s—even a day hurts.
Fuck no, it doesn't. I don't have social media on my smartphone, nor do I use my thumbs a lot with one. I can and do go for days without using my phone. The best apps I have on it are a timetable app for buses, and the clock. What he's saying may be true for a certain percent, but that doesn't mean that the smart way to be.
Originally shared by Ed S
Already, moving our world from the desktop to the smartphone has reduced our creativity and increased our stress, increased our disconnection from one another. So: "Why do we think moving the device inside our brain will make things any better?" - and other good thoughts in here too. Like, conversations are not about information transfer, they are part of a negotiation of a shared understanding.
Here's Elon's optimistic position:
"The thing that people, I think, don’t appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You’re already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. You’re already a different creature. You can see this when they do surveys of like, “how long do you want to be away from your phone?” and—particularly if you’re a teenager or in your 20s—even a day hurts. If you leave your phone behind, it’s like missing limb syndrome. I think people—they’re already kind of merged with their phone and their laptop and their applications and everything."
and
"We already have a digital tertiary layer in a sense, in that you have your computer or your phone or your applications. You can ask a question via Google and get an answer instantly. You can access any book or any music. With a spreadsheet, you can do incredible calculations. If you had an Empire State building filled with people—even if they had calculators, let alone if they had to do it with a pencil and paper—one person with a laptop could outdo the Empire State Building filled with people with calculators. You can video chat with someone in freaking Timbuktu for free. This would’ve gotten you burnt for witchcraft in the old days. You can record as much video with sound as you want, take a zillion pictures, have them tagged with who they are and when it took place. You can broadcast communications through social media to millions of people simultaneously for free. These are incredible superpowers that the President of the United States didn’t have twenty years ago."
via Tim Urban's very long piece on waitbuywhy.com
https://medium.com/the-eccentric-sage/my-biggest-question-about-elon-musks-neuralink-63540f5d31ba
Me too - we share a phone, it does SMS, we need to charge it once every few weeks because it's usually switched off.
ReplyDeleteThat said, we recently had a two week vacation, with no internet devices, and it was a markedly different feeling.
Having finished reading the article, Musk's idea seems too much like a DOCTOR WHO thing, especially Cybermen. I think it shows a profound misunderstanding of how creativity works.
ReplyDeleteI'm still working my way through the very much longer wait but why article. I don't see things the way Tim does. But there are some interesting thoughts (and experiments) in there.
ReplyDeleteThere comes a point when two animals can act as a single entity. I think we're too focused on the individual in modern Western society. I think better communication is not always about transferring thoughts from one pristine consciousness to another, it's sometimes about building a shared understanding in the group mind.
There's a rat experiment on waitbutwhy: one rat has the evidence of what to do, the other rat, very distant but brain-connected, has the ability to act. Over time, they cooperate, one being a sensory cortex and the other being a motor corex, with either both or neither getting the food reward - I think it said two-thirds of actions were rewarded, whereas random actions would only be one-half rewarded.
Really though, technology, like evolution, doesn't work that way. Old technologies, like old evolutionary developments never disappear entirely. Rather they get sidelined in a reduced form.
ReplyDeletePeople still use horses for travel, and other old technologies. Even if some adopted this, it wouldn't be adopted by all.