Wendy Mackay highlights growing dependence on digital technologies and loss of cognitive skills

At a conference, I asked the audience if they were still able to remember more than two phone numbers. The vast majority of spectators could not. In less than 20 years, people have become totally dependent on the “Contacts” application on their smartphone.” The anecdote of Wendy Mackay, computer scientist and research director at the Inria center, says a lot about our relationship with technology: by making certain tasks easier for us, it also ends up making us lose control of them. After all, GPS freed us from crumpled Michelin maps to unfold in the middle of traffic; the calculator saves us from applying the Euclidean division methods learned in primary school; and the Internet itself frees us from long afternoons spent at the public library finding answers to our questions.

Until now, digital technologies were only associated with a single type of use. There was never any question of using his Texas Instrument