My properly English mum would have disapproved of Steve Jobs’ famous slogan purely and simply for its grammatical incorrectness, for the same reason she tut-tutted whenever she saw a highway sign that said ‘GO SLOW’. The correct form was go slowly. Think differently. It requires the adverb, don’t you see?
I do, Mum, I do; but having spent most of my working life – to your endless chagrin – in the shadowy world of marketing, I accept that a certain creative license is allowed when crafting such directives. Sometimes the King’s English must bend to better allow for mouthiness, rythmn, or simple memorability. So I’m okay with the violation.
No, my issue with Mr Jobs’ imperative runs deeper than simple semantics. Think different, he urged. These days, I’d be happy if people would simply think.
Here’s the problem. The modern world is equipping us with ever more apps and devices that promise to anticipate our needs, respond to our wants, figure out solutions to problems before we even know we have a problem. In other words, to think for us.
I got a perfect illustration of this on a recent trip to Vancouver. I overheard two people discussing how to get from the ferry terminal to a certain location. Person A said: It’s super simple – you just stay on the highway until you see the exit marked ‘X’ and turn right. To which person B replied: Oh no, that’s way too complicated – I’ll just use the GPS.
Yup: a direction involving a single manouever – a simple exit off the highway- was too much for Person B to try and carry in their head; they chose to surrender authority for the decision making to a machine.
But here’s the rub: the brain is like any other muscle in the human corpus; unexercised, it quickly atrophies. The more we allow apps and tech to assume responsibility for our own thought processes, the more rapidly we will lose the ability to exercise those processes. We will lose the ability to think, and with it, the ability to reason, deduce, judge, assess and all the other cognitive skills that come with sentience.
Local author Michael Harris summed the situation up well in his book The End of Absence: ‘Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice.’
And, I would add, to exercise agency. Understand what part of your life the technology is planning to take control of, and make a conscious decision whether or not you want to surrender control of it.
Because every small win for the tech is a surrender for your own brain. And like the old UNCF slogan said: a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Especially your own.