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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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