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Is Modern Technology Killing Us By Ray Kurzweil

749 Words3 Pages

Modern Technology:
Promising a Future of Doom or Life?
Modern technology will affect human life in the coming future, for better or for worse. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist; a scientist who specializes in predictions about the future, in his essay “Promise and Peril”, he proposes possible advantages and disadvantages of technological improvement in the world, and mentions greatness of technology that not only benefits human life, but also the danger of its existence. After deciding between the effects, Kurzweil takes a stance for the idea that future technology will benefit humanity. On the other hand, the environmental journalist Erica Etelson disagrees with Kurzweil’s idea. In her article “Is Modern Technology Killing US?”, she argues that most …show more content…

However, mankind should be concerned of the risks that lie beneath it. The big aspects determining the future of modern technology is whether safety and utility will be able to catch up with the improvement of technology. In the early part of his essay, Kurzweil stated that the development of technology grows exponentially instead of linearly. Exponential grow makes it seems as if the technology is improving too fast for human to handle it. Kurzweil refuses to believe so, he argues that as the technology grows exponentially, the precaution and safety regarding the technology proportionally follows its …show more content…

Kurzweil is a technology optimist and he believes that technology always benefits human life. At first it seems that Etelson agrees with Kurzweil. In her first paragraph, Etelson states that she would not be the same person without technology. If the reader stops reading at this point, they might be tricked into believing that Etelson is a pro-modern-technology. However, throughout the rest of her essay she argues that technology often diminishes, rather than enriches quality of life. She argues that many times humans devalue life-affirming activities and ways of being. As technology improves, humans learn less and less of abilities and social

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However, mankind should be concerned of the risks that lie beneath it. The big debate determining the future of modern technology are whether safety and utility will be able to catch up with the improvement of technology. In the early part of his essay, Kurzweil states that the development of technology grows exponentially instead of linearly. Exponential growth makes it seem as if the technology is improving too fast for human to handle it. Kurzweil refuses to believe so; he argues that as technology grows exponentially, precaution and safety regarding technology proportionally follows its trail.

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Lately, research has shown that kids these days are not that intelligent as the use of technology increased. Their reading and math skills decreased and the amount of books they would read has also decreased as well. This has brought some worry to many adults that this upcoming generation will end up being the “dumbest.” However, there are multiple factors that can cause us to seem the “dumbest generation.” In Goldberg’s article, “If Technology Is Making Us Stupid, It’s Not Technology’s Fault,” he uses pathos and logos to prove that technology itself is not the reason why our level of intelligence is decreasing; instead, technology actually can prove to be making us smarter in different ways from the past.

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In the technology filled world that we live in, people have many different opinions and views on how this technology affects us whether it is positive or negative. This can be seen by comparing “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr and “Smarter than You Think?” by Clive Thompson and their separate opinions on this technology that is affecting us. Both Carr and Thompson agree that technology is having a large impact on people but what they differ on is the type of impact, Carr saying it’s a negative impact by making us too reliant on it and Thompson saying it’s a positive one in the way that it can help us accomplish many things. How has technology changed the skills people already possess? In the essay by Carr, he talks about the typewriter, but more specifically about the writer Friedrich Nietzsche who started to lose his vision and had to master touch-typing to be able to continue writing.

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In Bradbury's short stories, he uses his idea of the future to inform the reader on how technology could be a bad thing. He goes into great detail on how technology can be flawed, how it can negatively affect us, and how it may be advancing too far one way and not enough in the other. With that being said, what does he think the future will be like? Well, to answer answer that question, lets take a few examples from his work.

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Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt” teaches readers that too much technology can have a bad effect on people. In the story, the Hadley family lives in a Happylife Home which has machines that do pretty much everything for them. The machines make their meals, brush their teeth and tie their shoelaces. There is even a nursery for the children that creates any world they could imagine. In the end of the story, the nursery and the family take a turn for the worse.

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While this might be a very compelling argument to some, others have found technology to be quite contradictory to the perceived norms of Mother Nature and have stated that the introduction of this ever growing phenomenon has brought about a disturbance in natures ability to shape and reproduce the order of life. In trying to understand both these arguments one must start by understanding the true essence of what technology is and what qualities define and characterize it. According to Dusek(2001: 32/3), technology can be seen as an applied system that works together with a set of hardware tools to be set into a context for the people who use, repair and maintain it. He further suggests that as a tool, technology can be seen as a neutral instrument to be used or refused, yet when we look at technological systems it can then be viewed as being more autonomous (Dusek 2001 : 36). This tells us that technology consists of a vast range of features that characterize it and because of this a lot of people have formulated different opinions of its effect in our world through its growth.

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