The technologist and Columbia law professor Tim Wu has written what is perhaps the clearest defense of this development: If a time traveler from the early 1900s encountered a modern-day person with a smartphone and spoke to her through a curtain, what would he think? He’d be amazed by her ability to solve complex equations, to answer obscure trivia questions, to quote things in foreign languages. To him, the smartphone user would seem like some kind of genius. (To us, she’d just seem like some chick with a phone.) “With our machines, we are augmented humans and prosthetic gods,” Wu writes, “though we’re remarkably blasé about that fact, like anything we’re used to.”