A temporary lobotomy

Whilst in Sydney I endured the most banal of travel mishaps: I left my iPhone in the back of a cab.  We need not dwell on the details except to say that it was late in the evening and that wine had been taken.

My less than sympathetic mother joked that the loss was the equivalent of a lobotomy.  She was 100% correct in that I've outsourced much of my memory and lower-level mental functioning to a shiny piece of Apple.  To people of my parents' age there is still something shameful about an unnatural over-reliance on machines to assist with menial tasks such as addition, subtraction and the recall of phone numbers.  There are two responses to this: -

1. These are menial tasks.  Why expend any more effort on them than necessary?


2. Reliance on an iPhone for memory is no more unnatural than relying on a kitchen for digestion

In his wonderfully thought-provoking book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly describes technology as the entirely inevitable next stage of evolution.  A kitchen can be thought of as an external stomach that allows mankind to extract nutrients from a much wider range of foodstuffs.  Our species' ability to survive on cooked foods that can kill us if eaten raw is the reason why we dominate the planet.

Opting out of any technology, be it cooking or iPhone apps, is willfully contrarian and silly.  Still, doubtless there once lived some paleolithic version of me whose mother joked that his preference for cooked meat was proof that he'd gone soft.