It's the phone that's smart, not the user

If there is one thing that defines the modern generation it is outsourcing. The ability to delegate all of life's big and little issues, tasks and responsibilities, to someone else in order to focus on one's own tiny pocket of expertise has seen us deploy domestic duties, non-essential work tasks and even the raising of our families to other people.

Dinner comes ready-made in a jar, our consumer queries are solved over the phone with someone with an Indian accent, and childcare has entered the modern vernacular with such fast-paced venom that no one even noticed when the space got dropped and two words became a new and distinctly 21st century one, with dangerous implications.

But I never thought I'd see the day when we outsourced our brain.

As computers get smarter, original thought has remained the trump card held tightly by humans. Despite valiant efforts to attempt it, no one has been able to make even the most clever central processing unit think creatively, but since the great bulk of humanity now seem happy to give up their own ability to do so, what edge do we have?

Last night I was fortunate enough to find myself at a talk by New Zealand's most outspoken millionaire and raconteur, Sir Bob Jones. Speaking about his passion for books, he lamented the loss of intellect among the young, and the general dumbing down of the developed world now that technology has enabled us access to any and all information at a moment's notice.

But although Google and the internet have undoubtedly made life easier, have they made it richer?

Information has replaced intellect, and although I am without doubt one of the worst offenders, it appears we have outsourced our brain to our back pocket, wherein we keep the ever-so-aptly-named smart phone.

Thinking can be so dreadfully time-consuming. Thank goodness we now have a device to do that for us.

At Sir Bob's talk, I spotted a former colleague of considerable reputation whose name had escaped me. I pulled out my phone and Googled for it.

When we got home, I couldn't remember at what temperature I should cook lasagne, so I Googled that too.

I then had to add two parts olive oil to one part balsamic vinegar and, utterly unable to effect a simple equation in my head to figure out the proportions, I used the calculator on my phone. It was one step up from a ready-made salad dressing, but only just.

The smart phone is ironically achieving the exact opposite in its users, and a sinister symbiosis has emerged which is seeing our own intellect decrease in inverse proportions to the growing power of the electronic devices at our disposal. Undoubtedly, there is some sort of statistical way of measuring the slow decay, but until they invent a phone app to calculate it, I'll be damned if I can figure it out myself.

Sir Bob blamed television, with the internet, for the gradual vegetation of our minds. While he grew up reading books about the great classical heroes, our children are busy soaking up information on what Kim Kardashian ate for lunch and who looked hot at the Oscars.

I was inspired by his talk. It made me want to read. Sadly, in a recent shift I'd decided that books were obsolete and given most of them away. But I did have a newly minted Sony e-reader which I'd been meaning to fire up and use for quite some time.

I turned it on, determined to download something worthy and improving to read. Except I couldn't figure out how it worked. Fortunately, I didn't need to, because I pulled out my smart phone and Googled it.