Outsourcing

A few weeks ago, we were walking in a supremely beautiful and tranquil forest when the silence suddenly was shattered. My husband’s phone began shrieking an emergency alert. Since we live in a tornado-prone state, he immediately checked the message. “High flood waters in your area”, the robotic voice said.

At the moment we received the alert, we were standing on an eighty foot bluff. A short downpour had occurred earlier in the day, but our first thoughts were of relief as our farmers were badly in need of rain. Our smart phone was unsmartly calling “wolf” into the 50 mile radius around us.

We both concurred that some people with big brains are concocting electronic devices to take everyone else’s brains away. If we let electronic gadgets do all the thinking for us, we soon won’t be able to navigate our way out of a paper bag, let alone a real flood.

Examples of human deference to computer intelligence are rampant…the voice on the dashboard that supplants map reading ability, the ‘smart’ refrigerator that makes grocery lists, the cars that drive themselves and the medicines the are implanted in the body to release at prescribed times.

When some members of the wolf clan evolved into the creatures we call dogs, a large number of brain cells were lost along the way. That’s what happens when a master calls the shots.

I definitely think it is in my best interest to be able to figure out where I am on the planet, when my milk is running low, my pill needs to be taken and the river is at flood stage. Contracting out my brain doesn’t seem to be a winning proposition.

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