Is Technology Making Us Stupid?
Modern life has become more complex but most people never notice it as today’s innovative technology has made this complexity even simpler than ever. Advanced technology helps us solve lots of tasks: with a smartphone, we can buy goods in online stores, track our vital signs, navigate in unknown cities, and order college papers if we can’t complete them on our own at https://thepaperwriting.com/coursework-writing or on any other reliable essay writing service.
We can accomplish thousands of other tasks that we consider to be quite ordinary but which used to demand to learn specific advanced skills and having the necessary resources to perform them. Now our life is faster, simpler, cheaper, and more efficient due to 24/7 connectivity and the rapid rise of different apps. But, on the other hand, we have become more intellectually vulnerable in our life offline because without the internet access, even a 6-year old kid is smarter than us if he has good access to the web.
Now we don’t need to learn the complex details because the smartphone programmers have already taken care of so many things. From the historical point of view, technology has made all people individually smarter and individually dumber at the same time, and we have become collectively smarter. With technology, people are able to do more while at the same time, understanding less about what they are actually doing. Besides, technology has increased people’s dependence on others.
These processes began in the past when first humans started to farm. But technology innovations have accelerated this process in the recent decades when people started specializing in particular skills and outsourcing more skills to various tech tools. As a result, we don’t need to learn large amounts of technical knowledge. Besides, technology became available to many more people than in the past and they are using tech tools more readily.
Specialization makes people very smart at some specific activities but we have to invest a lot of time and money in these complex skills so we become helpless when it comes to simple skills like building our own shelters or growing our own food. When we become productive and efficient at one set of tasks, we become increasingly dependent on other people for our additional needs. We depend on other people to do what we can’t do well or can’t do at all.
Besides, people incorporate human skills into machines, for example, smartphones, and that lowers the entry barriers for doing something because we don’t need to know as much to operate machines. It’s much easier to learn to drive a car if it has not a manual but automatic transmission.
What can happen if those great technologies on which we rely so much break or disappear? The consequences may be dangerous for all of us. What can we do to increase our chances to survive if something is going wrong? We cannot become truly self-reliant but we can learn more about the advanced technologies that we use and learn at least basic skills of fixing and repairing them. The internet with its vast wealth of information on practically any topic can help decrease our dependence.
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