Smart?

Does technology make you smarter?

This is a short video clip of Elon Musk banging on about how we are all cyborgs. Here are some of the pearls:

“How much smarter are you with a phone or computer, or without? You’re vastly smarter actually. You can answer any question.”

“Your phone can remember...perfectly.”

“That phone is an extension of yourself.”

The Musk phenomenon is interesting. He is often spoken of in awed tones, regarded as a technology guru and a visionary. Yet most of the times when I see him open his mouth I most notice his glibness. Maybe that’s why he appeals to so many people. He’s a big ideas man and he gets people excited. I watched another video of him prattling on about his neuralink. His interviewers leaned forward raptly, hanging off every word, faces of tremulous excitement as though the future was being unveiled before their eyes while Elon spouted a load of piffle. It’s a fascinating phenomenon to see a not in the least impressive intellect garner such respect and status, and an army of acolytes. His ideas are often not much more than bling, and the warrant for his claims mostly lies with his status, and the accessibility of what he says. He certainly appeals to the I-can-grasp-this-so-I-must-be-smart crowd, who enlightened us during the so-called pandemic with their braying renditions of the current message. So, whatever Musk says, my response is to think: well, here’s some more intellectual fodder for the midwits.

However, Musk’s piffle is only a part of a larger problem. His pronouncements from this video are a good place to start. If we look at all three quotes together we can note a number of features. Musk’s glibness is not unique, many people seem to have a shallow understanding of a vast range of philosophical, historical, scientific, and so on, concepts. By exhibiting the same middlebrow demeanour and language as his audience, Musk can present his brilliant ideas as perfectly comprehensible. This flatters folks - “Musk is really smart, I get what he’s saying, so I’m really smart too”. This inculcates a false sense of security in his audience, a bastion and comfort against the demented chatter of social media or the fire-hosing we suffer at the hands of the mainstream media. His words offer a soothing, inspiring alternative. It’s grounded, it’s logical, its easy to get your head around and has a nice gloss of coolness. It’s a neat narrative that you can position yourself in and be carried along. He invites us into this comfortable world with repetition of “you” and “your”. A technological safe hangout, totally dope.

He has said much the same thing on a number of occasions, so it must be an article of faith. Technology makes you better at being you, a superior version of oneself. That’s a very seductive idea. All the “answers” are there at your fingertips. You can achieve so much more, as long as you have the right tech. It makes you smarter.

But the phone/computer is just another kind of tool that can enhance some human capabilities. All tools do that, is my phone/computer different? Enhancements that are sophisticated and complex, yes, but just tools for all that. Indeed, I am puzzled by the fetishization of phones – and computers, but phones are sexier. They have certainly enhanced our lives, anyone can see that, but I do not believe they are the revolutionary devices that they are claimed to be. If I compare the phone to some other radical technological innovation from the past, the phone is not such a big deal, nor has it made us any smarter. I’d argue that the telescope had a more profound effect on humanity in terms of making us smarter. It was crucial in the development of the modern scientific era and the Enlightenment, it radically altered our understanding of the universe and reconceptualised our place therein, it remains to the day, in all its different forms, a vital tool of scientific research, and it stimulated other technological developments such as that of the humble screw. The first serious scientific user of the telescope, Galileo, proposed ideas so subversive he was imprisoned and threatened with torture and execution by the church authorities. Never happened to Steve Jobs.

The Musk quotes embody a simplistic, mechanistic understanding of being smart. Sure, I can access information at a speed and scope that is astonishing. “You can answer any question” he asserts. Well, probably, if your question is limited to being answered by “information”.

I am a guitarist and access to guitar information is enthralling. There is a rich world of all kinds of musical information out there and places to discuss any facets of guitar music and culture. I can nerd out for hours.

Has it made me musically smarter? In terms of access to information and knowledge, absolutely. My musical life has been significantly enriched. So is Musk correct? Well, yes, to a degree. But that’s a tricky word, “smart”. In common parlance it corresponds to what Musk is saying. Smartness is a measurable, quantifiable...what? Characteristic? Quality? Power? And who gets to decide what smart is? What kinds of smart are more important than others? What a typical Western person living in the third decade of the twenty-first century believes is, or values as, smart, is different from that of their ancestors. Indigenous peoples will also differ greatly from us. Do they even have words or concepts for smart? Smartness is not, as the Musk quotes imply, a property like temperature or horsepower. It is a construct, shaped by the ideologies of people of power and influence. The way people conceive of smartness is affected by a cluster of learned assumptions. What we consider as smart is inflected by culture and ideology.

For instance, there is a persistent belief that introducing new technology into classrooms will improve learning. When I was still teaching there was a push for “smart-boards” to be installed in classrooms, teachers to be trained in their use and evidence of their use became part of one’s professional assessment. In practice these boards required lessons to be structured and presented in particular ways because you had to use features of the board whether they were helpful or not. The training was complicated and tedious and lessons took way longer to prepare. These lessons also embodied a more structured, top-down authoritarian practice, all students facing the front, not interacting, but passively receiving the information presented on the board. Needless to say the boards regularly malfunctioned so you had to have a backup plan to continue the lesson while you contacted tech support and waited for help to arrive and maybe even fix the problem.

The smart-boards did a few things really well, but they quickly became just a classroom whiteboard with some additional audio-visual capabilities. Most of what you could do with it, you didn’t. Did they make us better teachers? No. Did they assist student learning? No. The fetishization of so-called smart technology comes at the expense of understanding the human, and the contexts in which it is used. It assumes that a one way stream of information, mediated by digital finery, will fill our heads, making us smarter.

More significantly, it assumes that information or knowledge that is making us smarter is transparent. Information is information. Not so. Our gifts, skills, worldviews, purposes, social interactions, morality, and so on, all inflect what we do with information.

Another interesting and dangerous assumption underpinning Musk’s vision is that it conflates smartness with technical facility. Of course, new knowledge is gathered by us from elsewhere, but what we do with it when we use our range of human smarts is down to us. Musk’s view attempts to tip the balance in favour of the tech. So while he claims, “How much smarter are you with a phone..?” what he’s really saying is, “You’re not that smart and you need this tech to make you any smarter”. This is a disempowering idea and elides the agency that humans can bring to their uses of technology.

Furthermore, information that comes down the conduit to your phone or computer has often been filtered and adulterated for easy consumption and to conform to particular purposes. Where everybody draws from the same pool of information you get consensus and groupthink. Consequently, people will default into believing what the search results tell them. “You can answer any question.” Yeah, with the answers that those with power and influence want to give you. Even information such as horror stories about the threats of AI are, ironically, comforting, in that they fit into existing narratives and give us something to wonder at.

But an important quality of useful information is that it encourages us to think and act differently. If information confirms the majority or mainstream wisdom, then we should beware. Maybe that’s what Musk was getting at: that by being smarter via phone or computer we will be more discerning, more critical, more logical, using agency and imagination to boldly seek new intellectual horizons, because that would be smart. But I suspect not. I suspect his musings are symptomatic of a technocratic culture that valorizes technologies which attempt to configure what and how we think, yet claims that by our passively consuming and conforming to ideology, that we are somehow smarter.