Culture: Outsourcing our brains
From the August 2016 issue of The Rotarian
When I tell people I grew up in Palo Alto, Calif. – the epicenter of Silicon Valley – they tend to assume that I was born with a silver iPod in my mouth.
But back in the 1970s, Palo Alto was a sleepy college town. The big innovation of my boyhood was a gizmo that Alissa Fox once brought in for show and tell. It performed four basic math functions and displayed the result on a tiny LCD screen. We regarded the calculator as nothing short of a miracle.
When I tell my own kids about the devices I used throughout childhood – the phones bolted to the wall…
