Nicholas Carr Negative Effects Of Technology

As technology has become more advanced, people have begun to depend on it more and more. Nicholas Carr has dedicated much of his life to studying the effect that technology has made on the world. He sees the good things that have come from technology advancing, such as being able to get places faster, plowing fields more quickly, and being able to travel to unknown places without getting lost. However, he also has seen some negative effects that technology has had on mankind. Carr believes that man have altered their brain, lost touch with reality, and have started to see technology as a friend instead of an inanimate object. Carr shares an example about the cab drivers in London. He shares the view of a neuroscientist named Eleanor Maguire.

Carr says, “Farmers, similarly, lost some of their feel for the soil when they began using mechanical harrows and plows. Today’s industrial farm worker, sitting in his air-conditioned cage atop a gargantuan tractor, rarely touches the soil at all- though in a single day he can till a field that his hoe-wielding forebear could not have turned in a month” (130). It is insane that technology has allowed humans to become so distanced from the world around them. It is strange to think that years ago farmers were in constant contact with the soil. Today, however, farmers barely touch it. Humans have become so desensitized that most do not even notice how distanced from reality they have

ELIZA was a computer program that was invented in the 1960s that was programmed to use general responses to certain questions. This made it appear that the computer could really talk like a human. People began seeing all sorts of uses for ELIZA, and it got to the point where people believed that ELIZA could take the place of a therapist. Weizenbaum, the creator of ELIZA, said that even his secretary who had watched him create the program asked him to leave because the conversation she was having with the computer was too intimate. Carr quotes Weizenbaum when he says, “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” Weizenbaum noticed that his program was quite literally making people feel like the computer was a person, not just a system programmed with responses. This feeling has only increased as technology has advanced. Some people in the world today feel lost without their cell phones because it has become an extension of themselves.

Overall, Carr believes that while technology does have a lot of valuable characteristics, it also has some grave effects that can not be ignored. People have begun to depend on computers instead of their own brain, and that is detrimental to society. People have also lost sight with the world around them through staring at screens instead of enjoying nature. Others have lost contact with friends