I grew up using maps and having a sense of direction, and now I have a phone. I used to try to remember numbers, and now I... can just call them up instantly. And that's great. But what's happening right now is that we're in a phase of human evolution where we're merging with machines.
Interpretation
Franklin Foer reflects on the impact of technology on human memory and direction.
In this quote, Foer highlights the transformation brought about by technological advancements, specifically how reliance on devices like smartphones has altered our fundamental skills, such as navigation and memory. He suggests that while these changes have conveniences, they also represent a significant shift in human evolution as we increasingly integrate with machines, blurring the lines between human capability and technological assistance.
In practice
During a technology conference to illustrate the pros and cons of modern advancements.
The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.
We've been merging with tools since the beginning of human evolution, and arguably, that's one of the things that makes us human beings.
When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world.
It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us.
Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us.
Many of us now expect our online activities to be recorded and analyzed, but we assume the physical spaces we inhabit are different. The data broker industry doesn't see it that way. To them, even the act of walking down the street is a legitimate data set to be captured, catalogued, and exploited.
If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it's only a click away.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
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