Is Technology Bad?

Ruj Haan

Section13

Final Report

Recently, the technology news has been on fire, from announcements for new smart phones, house gadgets like Alexa, self-driving cars, quantum computers, to how the big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, etc. are using people's personal data. In recent years, technology has been growing at a really fast pace and it has raised a lot of questions in society. Movies like WALL-E,The Matrix, Terminator, Interstellar, I Robot, and the likes, where robots come and take over the world, have sewn some fear in people's minds about technology.

Ever since the early human days, humans have been trying to make our daily tasks easier by inventing helpful tools. For instance, in the early agriculture ages, we had to break the soil with sticks to plant crops and then separate the seeds by hand. In the end you had to harvest the crop by hand, which could take a really long time and a lot of physical power. Later on, we began to attach moldboard plows to animals so they could prepare the soil for seeding, which did speed up the process, however there was still a lot of work to be done by hand. After that, we began to invent machines like seed drills, harvest machines and so on, to do all the different steps of agriculture for us. Just as how we improved agriculture, we can see that the tech boom also parallels this idea. There is so much research to be done, we can implement artificial intelligence into almost anything and see drastic improvements.

One of the growing concerns in society these days is that technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take our jobs away. This is greatly echoed in every class regardless of social status. From my perspective, AI gives us the ability to train our computers to make our everyday tasks easier, similar to a giant trained elephant. In India, Thailand, and many other Asian countries, people have trained elephants to perform heavy tasks that are very labor intensive for centuries. AI is another way to make hard tasks easier-- and those tasks that were once impossible are now possible. Yes, many jobs that used to be done by humans might be replaced by machines, but that opens another window of job opportunities. I believe we should learn how to use the technology more carefully and adapt to it rather than hating it and distance from it.

We have already seen some positive results from using technology in healthcare, finance, agriculture, transportation, our daily lives and so on, but just like anything else there are positive and negative sides to the coin. If we are mindful of certain aspects, we should see more of the positive side than negative. For instance, the government needs to intervene and come up with legislation that will regulate the use of AI more efficiently. Just as how the government needed to intervene in order to protect the environment from factories that were irresponsibly handling wastes, we must learn about how technology like AI is impacting us and create rules that will protect our individual rights and other areas that are not currently known to us.

Work Cited:

• https://www.shutterstock.com/search/evolution+of+devices?section=1&context_photo=766830700&search_source=base_related_searches
• https://www.thoughtco.com/agricultural-revolution-1991931
• https://futureoflife.org/ai-policy-united-states/?cn-reloaded=1

Blog Post Comments:

• https://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-first-draft.html?showComment=1575521325753#c1122972965208732068
• https://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-philosophy-of-music.html?showComment=1575757999694#c2112676878611597286

Quiz:

1. What are 2 areas that AI has made a huge impact?
2. How is AI related to a trained elephant?

Discussion:

1. What is one of your top concerns about technology?
2. What is one area that you believe technology has the most impact?
3. What are some of your favorite technologies besides your phone and computer?