Technology Making us Better at Technology

I had a little scifi moment while reading a 2013 Scientific American article this morning. It was about the Flynn Effect, humanity getting smarter over time. The author suggested that there is a kind of feedback loop, in which smart people build better technology, which in turn makes people smarter, which leads to even better technology...

My first thought was, "Who is serving whom?" Maybe technology is evolving instead of people. The machine is training us to serve its needs.

(On a side note, I also said to myself, "This Flynn Effect sounds familiar." And immediately located a mini chapter on it in The Shallows, which presents an explanation I find more plausible.)

This got me thinking that the medium alters the message not only for the receiver, but also for the creator. If you write an email on your phone you likely use shorter or incomplete sentences than if you write it on your computer. But, if you write on your phone a lot, you might start composing messages that way all the time, even when you switch to another device.

Or an example that has become embarrassingly applicable to me: My phone autocorrects me so well (usually) that I routinely misspell words just through sloppy typing. It is no problem on my phone, but is inconvenient on the computer, where I have to go back and fix errors manually. Even so, the computer catches most misspelled words. It takes a few extra moments to hunt down the red squiggles, but I don't even have to think about what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.

And more troubling, because my phone fixes my typing, I have zero motivation to improve how I type on the phone.

The actual way that I write is different because of the technology that I use. And in joining myself with that technology I make myself dependent on it. I make myself an excellent target market for more like it. But if I'm not careful, I may start sharing the technology's message instead of my own.