How Smarter Phones Are Making Us Dumber

Smartphones are getting smarter by the day. The phone we buy today seems to be of the rock age in a year.

- Rajiv Sharma

The yearly launch of the upgraded versions of phones has a hidden message: Stay abreast or face the risk of being left behind in this tech-driven world.

Ironically, however, smartphone users are losing their basic skills to navigate, calculate, estimate and contemplate. Weather apps on our phones have become audacious enough to tell us that though it's 9 degrees Celsius outside, it feels colder like 5 degrees. Isn't it like playing mind games?

Gone are the days when we would try to learn multiplication tables by heart. Our teachers used to applaud students who could memorize tables up to 20. Phones have robbed us of simple skills of addition, subtraction and multiplication. Nowadays, almost everyone relies on their phone to calculate even the smallest of transactions.