I sincerely wonder about the effect of offloading so much of our "brainwork" to computers. No one remembers phone numbers or tries to navigate without GPS, and increasingly we depend on accesss to information so there's less practice with storage and recall.

What brain/neuron plasticity tells us is that our brains literally reallocate unused neurons for other tasks. So, on the one hand, a positive theory might have it that offloading more mundane tasks would free our brains for higher order thinking and creativity, etc.

But, it seems that we are instead finding more ways to distract ourselves with less meaningful "leisure" activity.

I don't know that we will literally start getting dumber, but it's hard to know whether we are headed in a good direction as the future gets closer to the now.

This is an old argument, it was made about writing, printing etc. The missing step is that these changes are actually optimisations because information really has become easier to access. If we were about to get transported to a pre-internet civilisation, then we would have cause to worry, but since we strongly expect to have access to computers and the internet for the rest of our lives, it is actually more efficient to spend our time learning other things.

We are getting worse at things that used to be considered 'smart' -- like information retention -- but we're better at using information because we have much more access to it now even than very smart people did in the 20th century.

>This is an old argument, it was made about writing, printing etc

One difference is that technology is replacing more and more of what we one might consider "mundane", but really involves higher order thinking that is important for creativity, critical-thinking, problem-solving, etc. For instance, the ability to draw from a broad swath of stored, assimilated, and well-understood information is a critical element of problem-solving and finding creative solutions.

Because functional intelligence to a large degree involves drawing on information and experiences to assemble solutions. This requires a "working set" from which to draw. It is not enough to simply look things up, because you don't know what to look up.

And, in general, what computers do for us that, say, simply printing or other older "technology" didn't supplant includes executive functioning (e.g. algorithmic tasks like mapping directions, etc.) Beyond simple information retrieval, computers actually solve problems for us. In fact, it's so different from something like printing that I am not sure I understand your analogy.

>we're better at using information because we have much more access to it now

Sounds intuitive, but I am not sure we have evidence for this. Ironically, though, computers are better at using information.

>it is actually more efficient to spend our time learning other things

I mentioned that this could be one theoretical upshot but, in general, I think our culture is going in the opposite direction with a tendency towards mindless distraction. Exclude tech people and reconsider your statement.

from the video: "..it only hears you when you use the wake word we chose..", so you can definitely chose "Computer" as your wake word

That doesn't necessarily mean that any word is an option, just that your set of options is larger than 1.

Isn't this patently false?

If it's not listening how can it hear the wake word?

Xbox and google now do the same thing. As I understand it all the sound is filtered locally for the keyword. If it's detected, then it starts recording and sends the audio to a server to be processed.

Now they just need a Paul Bettany voice pack.

That's pretty good, but it's second place to my desire for a Majel Barrett voice pack.

Funnily enough, Google Now's voice search was originally called "Project Majel" for that reason - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Now#History