Outsourcing Everything

Late last month in Wired, in a column titled “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” Clive Thompson argued that “the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.”

This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

To Thompson, this was something to be concerned about. “Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?” – for example, the way that involves “slowly ingesting and retaining a lifetime’s worth of facts”?

It seemed like a good question, and Thompson’s piece stayed on Wired’s most-e-mailed list a long time – long enough, apparently, for New York Times columnist David Brooks to absorb it and offer his own perspective on mental outsourcing:

Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins….

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic…. Om.

Yeah, interesting. But he might not have left it there, with a clunky joke. And Thompson might have done better than to end with the mild wish that “At the very least, I’d like to be able to remember my own phone number.” Because the more you look at “mental outsourcing,” the more it looks just like its cousin, business-task outsourcing – theoretically a good thing, but in reality riddled with traps and hazards. (more…)