Technology Doom?

Technology is rapidly developing as the time goes by. Just about few decades ago, electricity along with other technologies such as telephone was invented. Now, technology has developed up to the point that probably was not imaginable in the time when electricity was developed. We sure get a lot of comfortableness and pleasure from such development. We have television, refrigerator, computer, dish washer, etc. We have everything and that everything tends to do everything for us.

Because of our huge dependence on technology, some critics are saying that people are becoming “stupid”. They say that we cannot do anything without technology, that we are becoming incapable. I do feel that sometimes, too. I find myself using computer every day, seriously every single day. Through computer, we communicate, research, entertain, and much more. Also, I find that people nowadays cannot live without cell phone. Cell phone kinds of became one of people’s “cloth”; people have to “wear” it every time they leave home.

In Korea, calculators are not allowed in schools. Everything is done by your hand. Those calculations include from the range of simple addition and subtraction to multiplications, divisions of seven digits numbers. In high school when students are starting to learn derivatives and further calculus, calculators are not even allowed then. It takes pages of work to solve one problem. Few months ago, I noticed about myself something unbelievable. I was in American since fifth grade and all the math classes I took were allowed to use calculators. I did not use calculator when I was in fifth grade because I was used to not using calculators in Korea. Arithmetic that involved more than three digits naturally made other students to take out their calculators and punch in the numbers. For me, it was far more comfortable to write down on piece of paper including my mental math skill that I acquired over the years through practices and practices. It is in my high school senior calculus BC class that I found something out about myself. I found that myself using calculator for simplest math as far as something like 4+3. That was really weird. Of course I could do those kinds of arithmetic in my head and with accuracy but I did not feel comfortable with the answer. I only felt comfortable and secured only and only if the calculator specifically said 7 on its screen.

That was when I really thought of power of technology, how it is replacing our natural skills. But despite many criticisms and my own pro founding experience, I am actually not against rapid technology development. As the time goes by more technology will be developed and we will be depended on it. But why are people thinking about our lack of skills and incapability of us without the use of technology? I know that use humans are never going to be separated from the use of technology and our skills is measured by our own natural skills combined with help of technology. Even though I found myself incapable of doing math without the aid of calculator, I only found it surprising and only surprising, not despaired. I was surprised that how much I relied on small technology but not despaired because even though I noticed my incapability, technology is always going to be there to support it.

That is why I am not really worried about our dependence on technology. We humans led up to this point and those technologies all sprouted from human mind. Why can’t human freely be using the technology that was invented by their own? Technology was designed to help and aid humans and makes them more comfortable, and therefore we should not care about us becoming incapable or “stupid”. Say that after few centuries, we become totally incapable; I mean we cannot literally do anything without technology. It does not matter. We should have become incapable because there was technology that replaced such human skills. Just like we cannot understand how past people lived without refrigerator, phones, or electricity, the future people would not understand how people of in this century lived without technology that is going to be developed in the future.

My only concern about technology is alien invasions. That might sound childish but it really isn’t. Aliens with highly developed electromagnetic pulse or EMP might stop the humanity. EMP is pulse that disrupts and stops current and voltage flow. If the humanity is almost hundred depended on technology, therefore electricity, such alien invasion with EMP is going to destroy the humanity in seconds. I do not believe that aliens exist but who knows. A space is considered infinity and aliens are might be few light years away right now, ready to invade the earth. Few centuries later, they might be arriving in earth with much more developed technology than we humans will have.

Again, I do not stand against human dependency on technology. But I think no progress in technology won’t harm the humans. I believe that our comfortableness will always stay constant whether or not technology is developed. Our own nature skill plus skills of technology will equal constant comfortableness. For example, people in 1700s felt same satisfaction from their compared to us right now. Even though people of 1700s did not have our technology, they had more natural skills to replace it. On the other hand, even though our natural skills are decreased now, technology skill is replacing the gap. For those of critics who are saying technology development is bad, I want to say to them to think again because technologies were indeed invented from our own natural skills in the beginning.