Once upon a time we knew things. We weren’t walking encyclopaedias but we managed. The human race survived by gleaning knowledge from the world around us. We watched, listened, experimented and learnt from one another. Knowledge was passed down from one generation to another. Each generation added a little more towards the great store of human understanding.
We knew our friend’s telephone numbers. We knew how to get somewhere without a satnav. We consulted recipes, we read books. If we didn’t know something we asked someone who did or accepted that we’d probably never know the answer. Knowledge has always been our greatest survival tool.
It started innocently enough. It was subtle. It didn’t arrive one morning with trumpets blazing to announce that life as we’ve always known it was about to change forever! It crept insidiously into our lives, one small convenience at a time! It came in the form of a hand held mobile phone, a small device that allowed us to make telephone calls without the telephone being attached to a wall. It was revolutionary, sure, but fairly straightforward.
Then somehow that little phone got ideas above its station.
It acquired a camera, the internet, emails, texts, weather forecasts, shopping, banking and enough apps to fill several lifetimes! And then the introduction of AI created another whole new world. Before long that humble little phone had transformed itself into the Great Oracle, becoming a fundamental part of our lives! It can tell us where we are, where we’re going, what the weather’s doing, how many calories in a banana, the capital of Kazakhstan, the opening hours of a garden centre and how long we should boil an egg. The list is endless!
And we now keep a doctor in our pocket! Our little phone has appointed itself as the medical practitioner we never knew we needed. There is no waiting in a queue for our call to be answered, no receptionist asking intimate questions or if it’s urgent or could we wait two weeks for an appointment. And we can ask it anything. Google, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, whichever digital assistant we have chosen, can offer medical advice without us ever leaving our sofa!
We can ask , for example, ChatGPT, a medical question and, if we’ve already shared previous symptoms and medications, instead of starting from scratch each time, it can join the dots and put the latest query into context. It’s like a doctor who has read our notes before we’ve walked through the door!
We can call on our personal GP day or night. It won’t make us justify our symptoms. It simply waits while we discuss them in as much detail as possible. No judgment and no time restraints. It’ll ask pertinent questions and base the prognosis on comparing our symptoms against millions of other searches made by people feeling the same way. It bases its fundings, not by certainty, but by probability and confirmed by actual medical data. That’s what makes the diagnoses so convincing! But that does not mean that it should be a replacement for a doctor. It can just help us decide whether we really need to see one.
We no longer have to worry about being grammatically correct when we communicate. Once a sentence was structured with a beginning, a middle and an end. Now, apparently, whole words and sentences are considered an unnecessary extravagance. Thanks is now ‘thx’, you is now ‘u’, are, ‘r’, message, ‘msg’, later, l8r’, great, ‘gr8’. And then there are the common ones already well used, OMG, oh my God, BTW, by the way, IMO, in my opinion. Soon I suspect the entire English language will consist of three letters, a thumbs up emoji and a shrug!
We are, whether we like it or not, living in a brave new world. Technology reigns supreme and we are expected to keep up with it. Everything is becoming smarter and faster and reliant on passwords we struggle to remember. For the technophobes amongst us it is frankly alarming. But resist as we might there seems to be little choice but to embrace this digital revolution, press the right button and hope that we don’t inadvertently launch a satellite!
Once knowledge was gathered from books and from men
Then passed down through generations, again and again
Now families and friends are faces on a screen
Wonderfully connected yet very rarely seen
To get all the answers we have gadgets galore
So now we need humans much less than before
The art of communication will soon fade away
We’ll just text or email if we have something to say 👠
Jenny Burrell 