How smart are you?

I know I’m not as smart as I used to be; in fact I used to think I was smarter than I probably am. It’s all because people have stopped asking me questions, questions like the capital of Texas or how many zeros in a google. Because people have stopped asking, I don’t have to think as much anymore, so I’m probably getting dumber. Pictures of Jim Carrey start dancing around in my head when I read that.

Smart used to mean lots of things in the past but most of them had to do with knowledge and information. From remembering phone numbers, knowing the capital cities of all 196 countries to working out equations in your head, smart people were looked up to. All of this information and knowledge led to the perception of intelligence and power in people.

So why did they stop asking?

The net has made us all look smarter and by association with the worldwide web we have become smart, even if we weren’t. I no longer have to remember my 6 most important phone numbers. In fact I don’t have to remember any numbers as my phone will keep all 500 of them safe and readily accessible. Information in all its glory is no longer the prime advantage of smart people and has been showered upon all. The capital cities and anything you can think of can be found in a matter of seconds which will morph into nanoseconds in the future.

This information tidal wave is all consuming and it is thought that by next year the amount of information content on the net will surpass a zettabyte. That’s a billion trillion bytes, a figure I can’t imagine as I’ve lost the ability to do equations in my head. It is so large that all the words ever spoken by humans in the history of the world is estimated to be just 5 exabytes (huh?) or 1/200th of a zettabyte. Well that cleared it up for me or am I just being a smartarse? Maybe that’s all that is left for me to be?

Is information accessibility making us dumb?

The upside is I never have to think about or remember another thing for the rest of my life (imagine the exabytes of brain power I’m saving). Everything I think I know and should know, I can carry around in my phone computer and whip out at a moment’s notice to dazzle my audience with information brilliance. I may not even have to carry the phone around too much longer as futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts phones will be the size of blood cells within 25 years. How do I press the buttons?

So now I’m getting a little anxious about my relevance because no one has asked me a question in the last couple of weeks and I think I may become obsolete. I feel like I’m in a bad science fiction movie where my brain ends up in a glass jar. So what’s left for us to know if everyone knows the same things as you with a quick type into Google?

Take heart and don’t be fooled by the information generation who think all you need in life is Google and Facebook, as all this information needs to be analysed, comprehended, communicated and rationalised and that can only be done by, you guessed it, smart people. Tim O’Reilly once said the future belongs to data but the future belongs to the creative thinkers, analysts, artists and communicators.

Which are you and how smart are you?