Nomophobia.
The fear of being out of mobile contact is something that we all (while embarrassing)
have experienced some time or another. According to the Psychology Today, it
says on their website that the word is an abbreviation for “no-mobile-phone
phobia”, a term that was coined during a 2010 study by the UK Post Office. The
study found that 53 percent of mobile phone users in Britain felt worried or
anxious when they lost their phones according to the study that sampled 2,163
people.
But let’s take it even further, what if humans started to become so dependent
on our phones that we relied on it to do simple every day task. Task such as making
to do list, setting up alarm’s or even using it to send a text message. A great example of this dependency would be the widely popular Siri.
Siri
is as a type of technology (generally associated with the company Apple) that
acts as a virtual personal assistant that responds to the human voice commands.
Some of its features include making phone calls, browsing the web and even
looking up the nearest pizza place in your city. The possibilities of the
innovative technology are endless but many there have been many questions
asking if we have become too dependent on the technology.
Siri was first developed at SRI (Stanford
Research Institute) in the early 2000’s. According to the Stanford Research
Institute’s website the technology was developed “through the SRI-led Cognitive
Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project within DARPAS’s Personalized
Assistant that Learns (PAL) program”, the largest-known artificial intelligence
project in American history. (Siri, 2015). In 2007, Siri, Inc. was introduced
to the public and raised $24 million in two rounds of financing. Apple
eventually acquired Siri in 2010 and later debuted the software on their iPhone
4S in 2014. An article on the HuffingPost says that the phone company Verizon
was actually slated to sign a deal with Siri to make it apart of the Android
phones in 2009, but Apple later bought Siri and “insisted on making the
assistant exclusive to Apple devices.” (Bosker, 2013).
While
Siri’s technology allows for users to automate simple task through its
technology some are concerned with whether it may make humans too dependent on
the technology.
Watch
the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé
Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology talk about how are dependency on technology is
affecting the way that we communicate.
