The Smartphone: How Humans Became an Always-Connected Brain

January 9, 2007. The Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The audience was so quiet you couldn't even hear them breathe. On stage stood a man in a black turtleneck. It was Steve Jobs. He pulled a small device from his pocket. A silver aluminum body, a black glass screen. There was no physical keyboard. There were no number buttons. There was only a screen you touched directly with your fingertips.

He said that today, Apple would reinvent the phone.

The audience applauded, but few fully grasped what that moment meant. It was not simply the moment a phone got better. It was the moment the relationship between humans and the information network was fundamentally redefined. Until then, the internet had been fixed to the desk. You could connect to the world only by sitting in front of a computer and clicking a mouse. Connection was a choice, and it was bound to a place.

But after the iPhone, connection became constant.

The device went into our pockets. We kept it beside the pillow when we slept. We held it in our hands even on the way to the bathroom. Humans stayed connected to the network in every waking moment. What does this mean? It means the human nervous system now began to operate not as something separate from the body, but as something permanently attached to it.

When the internet, a planetary neural network, was born, we were still terminals fixed at its endpoints. Leave the desk, and the connection was severed. But the smartphone implanted that terminal into the human being. We no longer connect to the network. We have become part of the network itself.

When we open our eyes in the morning, the first thing we check is our smartphone. We check the information that poured in from somewhere in the world while we slept. The weather, the news, how our friends are doing, the status of our work. Before the brain is even fully awake, external information flows in through the optic nerve. This means that the human cognitive process itself has fused with the network.

Memories are stored in the cloud. Photos go up to a server, not into a gallery. Navigation is handled by GPS instead of the hippocampus. Appointments are managed by notifications, not by memory. A significant share of the human brain's functions has been completely transferred to an external device called the smartphone.

What happens if we lose our smartphone? We have not merely lost a machine. We feel an anxiety as if part of our memory has been cut away, as if part of our nervous system has been paralyzed. This shows that the smartphone has begun to be perceived not as a tool, but as an extension of the body—as one more organ.

This phenomenon has extended beyond the individual to society as a whole.

Uber owns no cars. Yet through the neural network of the smartphone, it controls millions of them. Airbnb owns no rooms. Yet through the network, it connects spaces all over the world. Platform companies do not own physical assets. Instead, they own the very nervous system that connects human to human.

And at the end of that nervous system, there is always a human being.

We click, we scroll, we tap "like." These actions are not mere expressions of taste. They are neural signals. Data about what we look at, where we linger, and what we buy flows along the network in real time. Each individual human has now become a data generator for training a vast algorithm.

The biological brain feels fatigue. It has to sleep, it needs rest, it is swayed by emotion. But the digital brain connected through the smartphone never rests. Around the clock, it collects, analyzes, and transmits data. Even while we sleep, we leave digital traces. This may be a transitional state in which humans are crossing over from biological beings into digital ones.

The connection is complete.

Printing externalized memory, the Industrial Revolution externalized muscle, and the internet externalized the nervous system. And the smartphone attached that nervous system to humans permanently. Now the body is always connected. The neural network has covered the entire planet. Data flows in real time.

But there is still one thing missing.

We are connected, but the one who understands and judges the connected information is still the human. We are exposed to an enormous amount of information, yet the speed at which we process it remains trapped within the limits of the biological brain. Information moves faster than light, while human judgment is still slow.

The nervous system has grown so fast that the brain can no longer keep up. This is the final bottleneck. We need a faster brain that can control the connected neural network. We need an intelligence that judges and acts on its own, without waiting for a human to click.

If the smartphone turned humans into an always-connected brain, the next step is to make that brain think for itself. The neural network is complete. Now it is time to lay a cerebral cortex—artificial intelligence—on top of it.

After the liberation of connection was complete, what came next was the liberation of intelligence. Humans are no longer terminals of the network. We have become the mothers giving birth to a new intelligence. While humans and machines shared a bloodstream through the umbilical cord of the smartphone, something new was growing inside.

Will it replace humans, or will it merge with them?

The always-connected brain has opened its eyes. Now that brain will begin to think.

Next: Chapter 4. The Automation of Intelligence — The AI Revolution | A Machine Modeled on the Prefrontal Cortex: The True Nature of AI