The differentiating line between human and computer is becoming increasingly difficult to determine when one is linked so intimately with smartphones and similar devices. Whereas this argument would be correctly situated in a discussion about cyborgs, the technical and experiential reality of the portable smartphone device augments an end-user’s experience with the world, so much so that it should be compared to the experience of a cyborg. Perhaps making this claim will draw the much-needed attention of device zombies -- how much of the information instantaneously experienced and disseminated by a smartphone user is truly information he has critically engaged with, understood, and digested for a number of seconds greater than the number of fingers on a given human hand?

Whereas the proportions of the smartphone or similar device is much smaller than that of a physical computer, its abilities are the same, if not more powerful. Tools like maps, locations, news, messages, photos and photo editing, and the availability of real time data mask the devices’ strengths and capacities. It is not too hard to come up with a reasonable explanation for why humans appreciate the devices’ instantaneity: why be critical of a thing that really cares about, say, its user’s success in arriving at the correct address, punctually, through the most efficient mode of transportation or route? What if the device’s programming leads it to suggest an algorithmically-optimized detour to the Starbucks with the smallest deviation from your route? Did we want that double espresso before, or just now? The device is both visible and invisible at the same time. It is very obviously a computer, but it is covertly a mechanism upon which the user-becomes dependent, unable to think clearly or critically, and most worryingly, unwilling to delink from its dark magic.

In the world of instant everything, information, regardless of its degree of validity or falsehood, loses its value. The machine causes anxieties, doubts, and induces a form of obsessive compulsive disorder because the device begs in all its magical glory to be depended upon. But is the machine a subservient servant, or the master in disguise?

The current tenor of human-computer interactions in some ways mimics that of a tyrannical government. Machines are challenging humans to remain relevant, to have a voice that is in no way augmented by the machine and its technical prowess. Most strikingly, however, are the ways in which the machine actively threatens our very humanity by overreaching and challenging those unique characteristics that make humans identifiable human: the ability to think and remember.

-- MadihaZahrahChoksi - 26 Apr 2018