What we handed over
You're carrying a supercomputer.
That's not a figure of speech. The device in your pocket would have been the most powerful machine on earth within living memory. There's another on your desk, a third in your bag, a fourth on the arm of the sofa. You reach for whichever is nearest without deciding to, the way Linus Van Pelt would reach for his blanket: not because you need it this second, but because being without it feels like something.
And each one opens onto more information than every person who has ever lived could read between them. Not more than you can read. More than anyone could, at any speed, in any lifetime, ever.
Here's the part worth sitting with. We did not become dependent on the answers. We became dependent on the availability of them, on the quiet certainty that anything we don't know is one reach away. And once that feeling is reliable enough, the knowing itself starts to look optional. So does the working out. So does the asking whether the answer was any good.
Below are twenty ordinary things. Not one of them was hard. Every one was done, by ordinary people, without help.
Each appears twice. How it was done then. What does it now.
How do you get directions to a destination?
- Then
- A road atlas in the glovebox, and you learned the route before you left.
- Now
- A voice saying turn left in 200 metres. You arrive having learned nothing, you couldn't draw the city you've crossed a hundred times, and when it sends you down a closed road you take it, because doubting it never occurs to you.
How do you find a phone number that isn't in your contacts?
- Then
- You knew the ones that mattered by heart, and you held more of them than most people do now.
- Now
- A search box for the businesses, and a synced list for the people. Your closest friends' numbers live on a server rather than in you, and if that list went tomorrow there are people you love you couldn't reach at all.
How do you call a taxi?
- Then
- A rank, a raised hand, or a number kept by the phone.
- Now
- A button. A car you didn't choose, a driver you don't speak to, and a price set by something there's no way to question.
How do you look up a public transport route and timetable?
- Then
- A folded paper timetable in your pocket, and the board at the station.
- Now
- A live map. When it's wrong you wait anyway, because the board that would have contradicted it is gone, and so is the habit of reading one.
How do you work out a travel time?
- Then
- Distance, average speed, and an estimate you learned to trust.
- Now
- An arrival time to the minute, recalculated as you go. You stopped estimating, so you hold no second opinion, and nothing in you notices when it's wrong.
How do you book a flight, a hotel, a restaurant?
- Then
- You telephoned and spoke to someone, or you walked in and asked.
- Now
- Three screens and a confirmation email. Nobody knows you're coming, nobody will remember you were there, and when the screen says something you doubt there's no one to ask.
How do you rent a vehicle?
- Then
- A counter, a conversation, and a printed map handed over with the keys.
- Now
- An app, a code, a car park. Nobody hands you anything, and when something's wrong there's nobody within a hundred miles who can be asked.
How do you check the weather?
- Then
- The sky, the barometer, and what the wind had been doing since morning.
- Now
- An hourly percentage, from a source you couldn't name. Hold two phones side by side, same place, same minute, and they'll often disagree with each other. Then you step outside, and it disagrees with both.
How do you look up a recipe?
- Then
- A handwritten card, a stained cookbook, or your grandmother.
- Now
- A page padded with a life story and four adverts, written to be found rather than to be cooked. You take the first one, because you're in a hurry, which is how you came to be searching instead of remembering.
How do you help your child with a school craft project?
- Then
- What was in the cupboard, and what you remembered making yourself.
- Now
- A search for what other parents made, and a shopping list for things you didn't need. The cupboard was never opened.
How do you fix something around the house?
- Then
- A manual, a neighbour who had done it before, and a willingness to take the thing apart.
- Now
- A video of a stranger's hands. It works right until the thing in front of you isn't the thing in the video, and then you have nothing, because you were following rather than understanding.
How do you diagnose a problem with your vehicle?
- Then
- You listened to it, you smelled it, and you opened it up and looked.
- Now
- A code read off a port and pasted into a search box. The car's still saying what's wrong, in the same sounds and smells it always used. Nobody's listening.
How do you find the meaning of a word?
- Then
- A dictionary, and you found four other words on the way.
- Now
- A definition at the top of the results. Where the word came from, what it used to mean and why it changed are further down, where nobody scrolls. You take the top line, because you're in a hurry, and you learn one word instead of four.
How do you find out what shows, films or events are on?
- Then
- The listings page, a poster on a wall, or a friend who had already been.
- Now
- A feed that decides what you might like, so you see more of what you've already seen. Nothing surprises you, and you've stopped noticing that nothing does.
How do you look up a historic event?
- Then
- An encyclopaedia set on a shelf, the public library, or ask your grandparents.
- Now
- A summary, confidently written, drawn from another summary. You stop at the first answer because it sounds finished, and finished is not the same as true.
How do you work out what foods are best for you?
- Then
- What your family had always eaten, and what your body told you afterwards.
- Now
- Whatever the current advice is. It changes, you change with it, and your body, which has been reporting back the whole time, is never consulted.
How do you find a remedy for a minor condition?
- Then
- Someone older than you, who had treated it before.
- Now
- A page written for advertising revenue, and nobody in the room who's done it. The advice arrives sounding certain, and certainty is the one thing it can produce at no cost.
How do you do simple arithmetic?
- Then
- In your head, or on the back of an envelope.
- Now
- The phone, or the browser, or the search box, or whatever answers questions this year. It hardly matters which. The sum leaves you before you've tried it, and when a total looks wrong there's nothing left in you to check it against.
How do you confirm that a sentence is correct?
- Then
- You read it aloud, and you knew when it was wrong.
- Now
- A green underline. You accept it, you never learn what the rule was, and next time you accept it again.
How do you research anything?
- Then
- A library, a catalogue drawer, and an afternoon you had set aside for it.
- Now
- A prompt, and an answer with no working shown. You can still check it, but only by deciding to: by asking where it came from, what it left out, and who gains from you believing it. That decision's available to everyone and almost nobody makes it, because we're busy and it sounds right.