Theme – The Bane and Boon of Technology

Q: Do you think technology is a blessing or a curse (or both)?

A: Both.

Technology represents the ultimate temptation to mankind. A seemingly endless string of advances, each one making things faster, smarter, stronger, cheaper and smaller. Within short decades computers have been divided in footprint and risen in exponential leaps in power. Our understanding of medicine and the human body increases, lengthening the lifespan of the average man by decades. And we’re hardly stopping there.

Yet often do artists and writers portray the less sunny side of technology. Personally, Matrix remains one of my favorites. Man makes machine and machine destroys man. One of the common staples in the contrast of man against technology. Terminator is another series of that general spin. But it’s doubtful the most real dangers of technology will develop in such spectacular turns. Not impossible, but less probable than the ways technology decays society already today.

Automation and remote control decrease the need for humans to move. Television, computers and video games provide sessile entertainment for generations of children. Mix that with improper eating habits and that makes for a less than fit and trim generation to come on the overall.

Military technology continues to improve, making it easier and cheaper to pack incredible explosive or kinetic force into smaller and smaller packages. All the better to obliterate another crumb of our world and perhaps disassemble the opposition into bloody chunks. Why? Whatever is the current reason that has been manufactured by the general clash of opposing leading egos.

Medical technology makes it easier to take care of others, but the better you understand the body and how it works, the easier it is to make it cease working. Poisons, bio-toxins and virus’ are some of the most insidious weapons out there. And no doubt we’ll keep making them better the more time we have to work on them.

Technology has its uses it is true. I love technology. I love computers, video games, music players and other boons that technology provides to me, filling my life with sights, sounds, ideas and challenges. Yet it isn’t prudent to explore and debate the cons in a human society where wisdom grows slowly as technology leaps well ahead of our maturity to use it properly. It’s a dangerous thing these days when we look only at what technology can do for us as individuals, companies or nations and not what it can do to and for us as humans or our planet as home to all X billion of our species.