As you may have heard, Google owned Motorola has launched a new smartphone that incorporates a quite intelligent voice control interface. Though I am generally excited to try and use new technologies, I have strong doubts that they, if just let loose, will take mankind to a better world. Why? Because most people, including myself, cannot yet use new gadgets properly.
People have already been attached to their smartphones to an unhealthy extent. Addiction is part of natural human behavior, but it doesn't mean you should obey it. Voice control makes it even more attractive to turn to your smartphone and engage with it, but the quantity and quality of information you receive is not really making it up for the loss of "real life" time. As this TED talk (and a great book titled Alone Together) by Sherry Turkle proves, we are very vulnerable when it comes to the seductive communication technology. Social media, short text messages and other smartphone-ready information is usually shallow, easy to digest and thus very addictive. Real life can be complicated, challenging, boring or even depressing. The reason people overuse their smartphones is not that they are hungrier for information, they just want to spend less time in real life.
So, back to voice control, does it save you "real life" time by enabling a more comfortable and quicker device operation? Let's calculate. If it takes 15 seconds of typing to look up something in google and 5 seconds by voice control, you spare 10 seconds using the latter. But, out of 10 things that come to your mind, so far you have only googled 2, because the slight inconvenience of typing held you back. Seeing the result, clicking on related content, sharing it on twitter or facebook will take, lets say 10 minutes, altogether stealing 20 minutes of your real life in case of typing. While with quicker voice control search, you will probably go for 6 things out of those ten that come to your mind, using up a total of 60 minutes, and winning back only 6 times 10 seconds which is a minute. OK, I am making these numbers up, but I am convinced they are close to what research would say. 20 minutes on your smartphone without voice control, nearly an hour with it. Are you sure this is where you want to go?
But what is the solution? People will always want to use new things that give them a "better" experience of some kind. How do we avoid losing our human self and marching into a Matrix-like network of shallow pseudo-connections? I think the answer is education.
We should introduce a subject in kindergardens and elementary schools that teaches kids to use technology in a sustainable way. In this case, sustainable meaning not giving up your own self to your gadgets but enriching your real life by their features. Maybe it can be called TAMING TECHNOLOGY. In a few years, I would love to ask my youngest son who is 3 months old now, "So what was today's TT class about?" And he will hopefully not answer like this: :(
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