Will smart technology help us age better, or will it just make us dumb?

Everett Collection Artificial intelligence has come a long way. New technology devices and apps pop up as abundantly as summer weeds here in Silicon Valley. Chip-enhanced products offer to satisfy almost every need imaginable. Prompts from your smart refrigerator tell you to buy more milk. With a voice command, music plays to facilitate meditation, thanks to your smart — always on — helper who listens for your next query from a canister on your kitchen counter; you know, the one with a woman’s voice and name. In this glut of offerings, how do you select what is truly useful from what is simply the latest “smart” thing? And by smart, I mean capable of following directions, solving problems, answering questions and learning on its own. Smart products depend on algorithms designed by engineers to create artificial intelligence, otherwise known as AI. And to be clear, AI is also critical to big data collection and industrial settings, but here we’ll focus on consumer applications. Predictions about AI If this all seems confusing to you, it may be because most of us are not engineers creating solutions for problems we didn’t know we had — until we heard about it in a tweet, an ad on our smart pad or TV or from our adult child or grandchild. How do we separate the helpful from the just trendy? How do we know if a thing aids our memory or just substitutes for our thinking? How do we evaluate whether a new app makes our life easier or simply supplants our own efforts in maintaining strong brains? For those of us who are Gen Xers, boomers or beyond, there’s the added question about which technologies we might embrace to facilitate healthy aging — ones that don’t seem to patronize us. A good […]

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