by Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. ~Aldous Huxley
For the past several hundreds of years, since the invention of steam engine and electricity, new technologies came out like rains. Light bulb, cars, air conditioner, smart phones, internet and etc. are examples of technologies invented in the past several years, which greatly benefited our life in terms of providing comfort and efficiencies. But did all of these benefits came with no cost? This is obviously not true! As a saying goes: “Every coin has two sides”, these advantages must came with an equivalent cost that may be explicit or implicit. In my opinion, I believe as technology makes our life more efficient, it also makes us vulnerable to changes.
How technologies made our lives more efficient would be easy to prove. For example we developed dish washer and lawn mowers as these two tools will do things a lot faster than us. Similar difference is also present in situation which machines are preferred due to their efficiency:
Meanwhile, the saying of “laziness helps technology advance” sounds very true in this setting. They are also invented because we are too lazy to wash dish or cut the grasses using our own hands. If everybody chooses to do things in the old fashioned way and never think about reducing the amount of work, I bet the advancement of science and technology would be way slower than that of today.
It’s hard to determine whether the prosperity brought by technological advancement is good or bad since we had both took advantage of this to fuilfil one of the species’ ultimate goals–to spread around the globe–and lost something in return.
Long time ago, when our ancestors were living as hunter-gathers, we had far better living skills than nowadays human beings. We were able to adapt under different climates and flexibly use different resources around us. However, if we ask a modern human to survive in the wild,
from https://www.boredpanda.com/living-in-the-wild-escape-danila-tkachenko/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic (by Julija Nėjė)
this would be unachievable without proper training. This proves that at least our adaptation skills went backwards. In this case, the main reason why humanity is never more prosperous than right now is that technology helps us to overcome the lacks of these abilities and made us better “survivors”. For example, we developed concrete, so we can build stronger shelters without even learning how to build one using woods on the ground. We invented cars for fast transportation so that we don’t need to have good strength to move fast. We also made factory and assembly lines to provide fresh food for a lot of people even if most of them don’t grow food.
Maybe, if we continue to develop and thrive in this living style, we will not be bothered by the things we lost, but no one can promise the world will remain the same-what if technology is taken out of our lives in the future, will we be ready for this type of change?