My wife and I have a joke that if there was a "Jeopardy" quiz show for the 70-years-and-older crowd, each time Alex gave the answer, he'd have to break for a string of commercials while the contestants used the time to wrack their brains for the question. That's because odds-on they know it, but immediately can't recall it. Time and again when we are with like-aged friends, we find ourselves trying to think of the name of a movie or its star, or the main player in some political scandal. The answer eventually bubbles to the surface for one of us, and he or she shouts it out triumphantly, but certainly not quickly enough for a quiz show demanding lightning-fast responses.
To explain this phenomenon, I like to compare senior brains to computer hard drives that are filled almost to the max. They are jammed with more than seven decades worth of information, from the sublime to the trivial. Yesterday, the name of that great Napa "red" you had for dinner was squeezed in tightly next to memories of the 1960 Francis Gary Powers U-2 spy plane crisis and the name of that bully who stole your Tastycake in the school lunchroom in 1955. Sorting through all of this data is not easy, and sometimes the answer will linger below the surface and wait to pop into our heads when we are in bed or the shower.
But what would happen if some of these facts didn't reside in our heads; if, over time, we lost the ability to remember much of anything outside of our personal experience? And what if the main culprit was Google and search engines like it? In "The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data," author Michael P. Lynch imagines "a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person's brain." When you have a question, from "What's the capital of Wyoming?" to "Can I take Green Spring Avenue to the Beltway?" you will simply pose it to your implant, either audibly or as a thought, and then "hear" the answer. Don't think it's possible? Ask Apple's Siri one of these questions and see what happens, and then think 30 years from now. If you still doubt me, did you ever dream that you could audibly ask your phone where the nearest deli is, and that it would speak back to you with a precise answer?
My 30-year prediction comes from discussions of the "technological singularity," a hypothetical future when our intelligence transcends the biological because of the fusion of our bodies with computers. Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes this will happen around 2045. Computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge thinks it will be 15 years sooner. Tell your kids and grandkids to buckle their seat belts.
When — not if — the smartphone implants are a reality, what will formal education look like? How will schools teach and test in this brave, new world? Will it even be necessary to take a class in U.S. history if all we have to do is ask questions of ourselves to get the answers? And what will happen to the people who can't afford smartphone implants? Will this cause an even greater stratification of society; a bigger digital divide than what we now have? For equity's sake, will the government think it necessary to install implants for all children when they reach school age, like they once dispensed sugar cubes with the Polio vaccine back in the 1950s?
With apologies to math teachers, there's no doubting that the widespread use of calculators has made the memorization of multiplication tables and the mastering of long division virtually useless and a vestige of the past. Will smartphone implants make the traditional learning of facts, dates and processes similarly outdated?
And here comes the $64,000 question: What happens when the power grid is destroyed by a natural or man-made calamity of Armageddon-like proportions? Without access to Google, will our grandkids' brains become a clean slate? Will they instinctively know that the U.S. is a democratic republic of 50 sovereign states and that our government is guided by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights? Or will history begin to resemble the plot of "Planet of the Apes"? This gives a whole new spin to losing our minds.
Frank Batavick writes from Westminster. His column appears Fridays. Email him at fjbatavick@gmail.com.
