Two weeks ago, I came into class almost an hour late due to the tire pressure warning light in my car going off and having to get it looked at before I went to school. After getting my tires filled with air, it was determined that the warning light probably went off due to the change in temperature, as it was really cold that day when previously it was summer warm. This incident--as well as recent class discussions--has brought back into my mind something that is quite scary if you think about it. How reliant are we becoming on technology?
Don't get me wrong--technology and its advancement is probably one of the best things that's happened. We're able to use it to do things people centuries ago couldn't dream of doing, and it's helped to make life more comfortable and perhaps easier for those that can afford it. But at the same time, I fear we may become too comfortable and forget how to live.
In terms of my check tire pressure light incident, I probably could've determined that the tires are fine, it's just the pressure changes due to the cold weather all on my own. But because I have this supposed warning light that's supposed to tell me that something's wrong, I had to go check it out. It's one of the cases where technology has proven to be a hindrance because then I get paranoid about if my tires are really damaged or not.
But in the last class, we went into a discussion regarding autonomous cars and talking about whether it would be viable to have such things on the road. I'm not going to repeat many of the points made, but I think one point did stand out to me--that it's okay to have autonomous cars, provided we don't stop teaching people how to drive. And I believe the same thing should be said for any piece of technology that supposedly makes life easier.
Now you might be asking, "what's the point of having the technology to do something if we have to learn how to do that something anyway?" It does seem pretty inefficient when you pose it that way, but you have to remember--as much as we try to make technology so that it doesn't break, there's always the chance that it might stop working at the most critical moments. Science fiction seems to poke at this a lot--in one Call of Duty game, a nuke was fired above the Washington DC area that created an electric-magnetic pulse that wiped out anything digital in the area. In Pacific Rim (spoiler alert), the monsters disabled the giant robots because they ran on digital systems. In both cases, the people involved had to rely on non digital means to continue on.
Of course, it's unlikely that we'll ever encounter such extreme situations as shown in video games and movies, but there's always that chance that technology can stop working and we need to be ready for when that happens, and the best way to do that is to learn how to do things without technology.
I look at it a little differently. Sure, in this one case, you wound up wasting time on a problem that wound up not being as urgent as you thought. However, would you really have cheked the tire pressure yourself? Probably not. And it could have been much worse. I think that as times change and peeople become busier, it's important for technology to help us with things like that. What if you were on the highway and your tire pressure was dangerously low? You never would have known and you could have experienced a blow out or something more catastrophic.
ReplyDeleteI also think that as technology gets better, things will change as well. Imaging if your car gave you a more customized warning. "Your tire pressure is getting low, you should fill your front driver's side tire soon." Then maybe you would get another warning if the situation got worse. "You still haven't filled your tire, it is now unsafe to drive faster than 50mph." With more detailed messages like this, you would be able to make a more informed decision about what to do..
This is just one example, but I think it lends itself to show that technology can really improve the quality of our lives, in this case when it comes to safety.
I am going to agree with the poster above and posit my own argument.
ReplyDeleteDo you know how to run a farm, build a house, churn butter, butcher a cow, hunt... All these things, which at one time were required knowledge, have all been delegated to a few in our society. We are already reliant on technology to keep us alive. Our supermarkets usually only hold enough food to stay stocked for a few days, a week at most. But do we worry about this? Not really. The time saved by not having to produce out own food allows us to spend time doing other things like study at university. Which allows us to produce better means of producing food, which frees up even more time to study. And the cycle continues.