“Smart”: Is it Newspeak for Dumb?

“Good technologies have few costs in the imaginary world we inhabit, bad technologies have no benefits, and all decisions are easy.”

– Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow

In the world of George Orwell, which was supposedly smashed by Apple in its landmark Super Bowl commercial, Orwell foreshadows video mind control with “Newspeak,” which erodes language and undoes meaning. This, of course, has been trumped by political propaganda, advertising, and the ubiquitous subliminal conditioning wrought by devices that starry-eyed, biology-blind technophiles call “smart”.

So, what is smart—in English as opposed to Star Trek (ST:NG) language that actors called technobabble?

I would propose that is the optimal objective and subjective solving of the problem at hand—which means identifying the best way to ensure a living future while creating a good life. The only either/or choice here is life or death. Choosing death of an individual, species, or habitat is not smart. If you favor death and destruction, there’s no chance to do the same stupid modern thing over and over. And your premature death does not benefit any living thing, because we’re all in this together.

The books by Julia Watson and by Bruce Pascoe present tens of thousands of years of smart housing methods that gave us this precious chance to live because they were fully sustainable. Present “smart” choices in the marketplace are arguably spending the last 300 million years of evolution on what Rick Mercer calls “digital crack.”

For another view of the truly smart technology that is compatible with a living future, try by Birnbaum and Fox.