Technology And Technology: The Dark Side Of Technology

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Emmanuel Mesthene wrote that technology is "the organization of knowledge for the achievement of practical purposes." ESA (European Space Agency) says that "technology is the practical application of knowledge so that something entirely new can be done, or so that something can be done in a completely new way." We commonly associate technology with things. We call the Space Shuttle a piece of technology. But that is inaccurate. Many technologies are used to fabricate a Space Shuttle. Many technologies are embedded within a Space Shuttle. And a Space Shuttle provides us ways to do things - they facilitate technologies. To have a technology means to know how to do something and to be able to do it - to know how to build something and then…show more content…
Technology is used to save lives, protect, educate, entertain and so much more. But there is a dark side to technology. While saving us from our mundane and difficult existence, technology also separates us from our humanity. There is an old saying - "The solution to every problem is the source of the next problem." As an example of de-humanization, the ever encroaching march of technology is now starting to impact the job market in North America. There are fewer and fewer people required to perform most jobs resulting in significant and growing unemployment. Businesses argue that the automation of labor is a good thing since fewer people means less costs resulting in more profit. But when fewer people are working, the social costs of addressing the unemployment problem need to be considered. While it can be argued that technology relieves humanity of drudgery, the fact is that technology, carried to its ultimate conclusion, relieves humanity of all forms of work leaving human-kind with nothing to do. While some people might consider this utopia, it could also result in a dystopian world where people, like rich families, without purpose and without a need to care lose the ability to get…show more content…
The way I see it, there's a kind of inescapable corrective feedback loop that works as follows: whenever we become too enamored of our tools and start denying our humanity, deep human drives kick in and produce a failure awareness that tends to return us to healthy uses of technology without abandoning it altogether. When the pendulum is about to swing back, many people get the impression that 'technology did this to us', but I believe that, at the fundamental level, our brains and how they work are both culprit and savior. Technology isn’t to blame for the ever decreasing morals of today’s society. There are abundance of examples where human’s immorality are actually what had shaped the world as we know it today like the 1st century Rome, Dark ages, Communist revolutionaries in Russia and China. These show that humans can be quite inhumane when they feel justified. We've been terrible to each other for as long as we've had written history. I think if anything, liberal and wealthy societies are much more humane because we have the luxury of time and opportunity to think about how we treat each other. If anything technology advances decency and civil

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