People are addicted to their smart phones, so much so that they walk into fountains, kill pedestrians and other drivers, and expose themselves to scam artists, muggers, and perverts.  Beyond that, or bloviating about trivial matters, or being a narcissistic showoff on social media, what can a smart phone do for you?  Depends on who you are, of course.  I’ll turn the question around and discuss what your smart phone CANNOT do.

ID a song.  I heard an oldie the other day.  I could hum the melody.  Loved the piano riffs.  But if I hadn’t been able to remember the name of the performer, I could have never answered the question: Who’s that performer and what became of him?  (It was Richard Marx, by the way.  He’s going on tour and has a new album.)  Song recognition isn’t covered by voice recognition.

Make par in golf, or catch a fish.  It might know what those things are, but it can’t do them.  And it can’t help you do them either.  Smart phones are just limited little computers, apps are just limited little programs, and neither of them are really smart.

Write a novel.  Beyond mentioning the obvious that your smart phone can’t create any of the elements necessary to spin a good yarn, try writing a novel with your thumbs!  Voice recognition technology, you say?  Try it.  You’ll be spending so much time editing that you’ll scream for your laptop.  Or join Jack in the Cuckoo’s Nest.  But maybe all those badly edited ebooks are written this way?

Help you find God or inner peace.  It might hook you up with the latest online quack who calls her- or himself a preacher, but God doesn’t answer a smart phone call and the internet offers no inner peace, just a bunch of random stuff that obeys Sturgeon’s Law, not God’s.  You can obtain more peace by putting your phone on a tile floor and stomping it into pieces.

Make popcorn.  Tres important, mes amis!

Offer a substitute for a loved one’s hug or kiss.  You might find a dating site or attract a pervert on Facebook (is that what the new “love” emoticon on FB is for?), but your smart phone is not much of a companion, in spite of your obsession with it.  Moreover, anyone who kisses her or his iPhone or Galaxy screen is just asking for a major bout with the flu, unless s/he puts hand sanitizer on that screen often enough.  That would have the advantage of making it slippery so thieves couldn’t grab it as easily…or make it drop to that tile floor and shatter into pieces!

Save animals from extinction.  That’s an important priority for me, but maybe not for you.  Of course, you could help the cause by taking all the smart phones away from the poachers.  Smart phones are used like walkie-talkies nowadays, by the NYPD and criminals alike.  It can transfer all sorts of information that human beings (not smart phones) have generated—not all that info is used in a good way.

Save your butt when your kayak flips over.  Sorry, sportsperson, your iPhone is on the bottom in twenty feet of saltwater.  9-1-1 is a distant memory as you sink into the frigid water to drown.

Determine if ETs from different planets can have offspring.  Mr. Spock and Counselor Cleavage represent fictional proof that it can happen, but Kermit and Miss Piggy offer a real-life counterexample it can’t.  I don’t know about Rosemary’s baby—if the Devil is a fallen angel, is he an asexual alien?  If so, how could he rape Rosemary?  Try finding any of this out on your smart phone.  Go ahead.  Ask Siri.  She won’t give you any answers because she’s really an alien too.

Eliminate toxic waste.  In fact, old smart phones just create more of it—and it’s so toxic it kills people.  Just ask those people in Bangladesh searching for rare earth metals in the electronic waste piles of Bangladesh.  The byproducts of technology are often poisonous.

Tell you who’s living at an address.  Plug in an address and Google Maps will find it (not Apple’s mapping software).  But you don’t know who’s living there now.  It might have become a meth lab.  Or a brothel.  Of course, maybe you want to find one of those.  If so, get a life.

Protect you from a mugging.  On the contrary, using a smart phone makes you attractive to muggers.  Doing a selfie also tells thieves where you aren’t—not at home, for example.  Perps use info too—more and more every day.  And they troll for yours.  So do companies.  And you thought it was only the NSA?  Snowden didn’t know the half of it.  Companies intrude on your privacy a lot more than the government.  Of course, Snowden was a half-assed traitor and describable by the Einstein pronouncement above (and maybe Sturgeon’s Law applied to a group of one?), so Siri probably is smarter than he is.

Protect you and your children from perverts.  Again, it’s the contrary—a smart phone opens all of you up to attacks from society’s predators.  Stalkers, pedophiles, bullies—today you need a smart phone and a few social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram, and you’re set for life if you’re a pervert.  Well, maybe life in prison if someone catches you murdering someone.

Analyze mountains of data and come up with a theory.  Ask any scientist whether s/he does calculations on a smart phone.  As s/he mulls over whether to answer a stupid question nicely, you can photograph their facial expressions, of course—or do a video close-up of the scientist wagging their middle finger at you when s/he realizes you’re not worth a politically correct reply.  (I’m talking about real scientists, not those hacks who work for data-mining corporations processing the mountains of data you provide them on your smart phone.)

Protect you from terrorists.  Oops!  Kind of hard to mark 9-1-1 with a bullet in the head.  Kind of hard for the FBI and other agencies to protect you from that fate when their hands are tied by encryption.  You’ll probably die because of your love your privacy.  Of course, if you really valued your privacy, you wouldn’t have your data on your smart phone or computer to begin with.  You wouldn’t even have it in the iCloud.  You’d have it on an external hard drive tucked away in a safe.  The Pentagon doesn’t put classified data on the internet (they leave that to SecState).  Remember: the terrorists love smart phones, and the more encryption, the better.  It lets them plan their attacks and adjust to authorities’ movements in a flash.  Be assured that every member of ISIS, here or abroad, has an iPhone!

Make Tim Cook human, not an android.  Or, should I say iPhone?  Of course, I’m being naive here—nothing can make Tim Cook human.  Terrorists and their supporters aren’t human, they’re mad dogs.  Maybe someone should tell ISIS how close Apple HQ is to San Bernardino?

***

[Like sci-fi thrills and conspiracies?  Have you tried the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy”?  The clones make their appearance in Full Medical, they combine forces with the mutant in Evil Agenda, and they save the world in No Amber Waves of Grain.  These aren’t comic book characters like X-Men—they’re real people that try to halt a dystopian future.  Available in all ebook formats.]

And so it goes….

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2016 at 4:00 am and is filed under Capitalism Without Control, Science, Technology, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.