Human Intervention

I had the unfortunate case of coming late to the last class due to feeling under the weather, so I was unable to take part in a majority of the discussion on post humanism. I was really looking forward to hearing more from everyone regarding this issue because I feel that despite all these technologies at our hands, at the end of the day it is up to humans to still make the right decisions.

Sure, we may be giving more and more things to technology to do for us, and sure, technology may make life easier so we can focus on supposedly more important things in life, but the human factor will still play a role in anything involving technology, since we are the ones using it. We are the ones that decide if we use a certain protocol or not. We are the ones that can choose to be lazy-asses who don't know how to do anything and just let the technology do it for us. We are the ones that can use technology in the right way and benefit others or the wrong way and harm others. That's why we should constantly have to question the makers of new technology.

With any technology, we need to ask ourselves if it's really necessary to make--does the problem that the technology solves really that much of a problem? Or was it developed solely to encourage being lazy and to make money off of the fact that people have this desire to do less work? I know there's a bunch of people out there that think that they do too much and want to be able to do less, but maybe there's a reason why we should do the work rather than have technology do it for us. The iffy example I want to give pertains to what I might possibly tackle in my final paper, in that the internet has made it much easier to look up anything, so why bother with a college education when you can just search up the information you need? Why not just make searching for the information you need easier than actually learning material, which can take up a lot of time? For most people, they'll swat this question away because they're not concerned with actual learning--they just want what's necessary to get the job done.

That's why I feel like rather than just focus on making technology better, we should also find ways to make humans better. And by that I mean without having to use technology. Educate people so that they can make better decisions. Have them do the work and reinforce the information that they should know. Because everything pretty much comes down to the choices that we make, whether individually or as a group. And the more knowledgeable people are, the more informed their decisions will be, which will usually turn out to be a better choice to make.

That's one of the things I'm taking away from this class--that even with all these advances in technology and improvements to the human condition, we still need to strive to be better without the use of tools. That way, when we do have technology in the palms of our hands, we'll be better able to use it.