Smart M-ways, smart phones, smart homes... why ARE they all so dumb?

take so-called smart motorways. Stupidest idea since diet water. Quite where it came from is unclear, but the fact remains that a few years ago all the motorways that used to work perfectly OK — give or take the odd traffic jam — started becoming nigh on impassable.

With no discernible warning or obvious justification, some satanic sub- department of Highways england decided that all our dimwitted old motorways had to be upgraded to shiny new ‘smart’ ones. Meaning that all of a sudden a journey that might have taken an hour took at least twice that because of all the roadworks.

and when they were finished, the new smart motorways had no hard shoulders, meaning broken-down cars had nowhere safe to wait; 38 people have been killed on smart motorways in the past five years.

no one bothered to ask us, the motorists, what we thought of this idea, probably because it would have been met with a resounding boot.

UT dumb motorways are typical of all this new smartness that seems to be coming our way. typical in that they render a tried-andtested system stupidly complex for no other purpose than to make the lives of nosy government departments and big business easier.

in the case of the poor beleaguered motorist, the long-term strategy behind smart motorways is to facilitate the introduction of driverless — or, you guessed it, smart — cars whose every move will be tracked by a central database.

Ostensibly, this will lead to fewer accidents and safer, more fuelefficient travelling.

But you and i know it will just mean even more delay and frustration. in the meantime, the authorities will be able to track where we go, while the big data firms will be able to harvest even more details about our lives to use for whatever nefarious means they see fit. Ditto smartphones. So clever, in fact, that they make us do stupid things like step out in front of a car while texting, or walk into a lamppost while chatting on Facetime.

Only this week, researchers in Canada published a study identifying texting or browsing while walking as a leading cause of injury among young people.

Before all this smart tech entered our lives, before we allowed our fridges to tell us what to eat and our radios what to listen to and our tvs what to watch; before we surrendered all autonomy to the gods of ‘smart’ things, human beings were already pretty damn smart.

We wrote books and poetry, created breathtaking works of art, built palaces and temples that still stand to this day, sailed oceans and conquered space.

i’m not for one second suggesting that technology hasn’t made our lives much easier in many ways. Simply that the smarter the tech gets, the stupider we humans seem to become. i don’t see how anyone could consider that progress. e live in the age of smart things. Smartphones, smart motorways, smart homes, smart meters, ‘smart’ cars, smart tvs. and yet, have you noticed how almost anything that carries the prefix ‘smart’ somehow ends up being anything but?