A couple nights ago my girlfriend and I were watching TV and a commercial for the new iPhone 4S came on, spotlighting the new Siri software. After the commercial aired, K turned to me and said, "That's a pretty cool feature." My response was, "Yeah, but...", and then I launched into my thoughts.
Don't get me wrong, having a digital assistant software that recognizes language and is able to take care of tasks for you is pretty damn cool. I'm not debating that. What bothers me about the whole situation is that it removes yet another layer of the user being able to handle their hardware. It gets rid of the user having to know how to navigate a search engine, or being able to find a solution on their own, or even handle the most menial of tasks, such as setting an alarm or placing a reminder in their calendar. This is just the latest iteration of having yet another "smart" feature built into a device that everyone can use on a day-to-day basis.
Smartphones are great tools. I love being able to hop on the Internet at any time I want to look something up or make a quick post to G+ or Facebook. I love being able to get in a quick game of Angry Birds while waiting in line, or have several gigabytes of my music collection along with me in my pocket. But smartphones also have made people more dumb. No one remembers phone numbers anymore; they just plug them into their phone and let the phone handle that for them. I keep all my contacts backed up to my Google account so if I lose my phone I'm still ok, but if the average cell phone user probably doesn't. So if they lose said phone, they're screwed. The same thing goes for getting directions and navigating to a location where one has never been before. Most people these days can't read a map to save their lives, thanks to reliance on the GPS units and live maps that are available on their phones. No phone equals no ability to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B. Or heavens forbid that any of the aforementioned features up and quit working, or the user accidentally messes up their settings and can't figure out what they did. Given the metric boatload of crapola (delivered courtesy of our users) that I have to deal with on a daily basis at my job, where we support a very specialized software and a very specific range of hardware, I'd hate to see what the support staff for the cellular companies have to deal with on a daily basis.
Anyway, the whole point of this stream-of-consciousness rant from back when I saw the commercial boils down to supporting yet another one of my core beliefs - Man creates the tools to make his life easier, but in the long run it will only make life harder because fewer and fewer people will know how to repair the tools when they break.
No comments:
Post a Comment