In the last 30 or so years we have reached a level of availability for technology that was only dreamed of in movies like Back to the future (no hover boards yet sadly). What I wanted to find out in my research is whether technology is a benefit to humanity or a danger that we are ignoring because of how much we’ve come to rely on it. This topic is particularly interesting to me because I intend to have a career in technology in the future and hopefully become a programmer. Technology getting out of control is something that has been explored in many movies and science fiction novels but I feel that we are getting very close to it becoming reality, maybe not to the extreme of something like IRobot where robots try to overthrow humanity but more like Wall-E where the robots took care of everyone’s needs leading to them all becoming useless.

The impact of technology on the attention spans of the newer generation is something that has been talked about a lot in regards to how technology has affected our lifestyles. In class one of the first articles we read was about google possibly having a negative effect on our attention spans entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? By Nicholas Carr. The article mentions studies that have found that the internet has affected the way we read and consume information in a way that is quicker than people in the past, we “Power browse” (Carr), instead of reading the whole page. An article in The Telegraph , a British newspaper, talks about the same topic and cites a study of brain activity of people who use smart phones to “struggle to focus in environments where prolonged attention is needed” but “They’re better at identifying what they want/don’t want to engage with and need less to process and commit things to memory.” (Leon Watson). It seems that the internet and the information overload that it gives us has both negatively and positively affected how we pay attention and process information. We now judge what is important and what isn’t in a way much faster than our predecessors were capable of, but this has taken a toll on our long term attention spans as we grow bored of repetitive tasks quicker. This can be either good or bad depending on what you are doing but there is no doubt that technology has affected how we think.

Social media is a big part of everyone’s lives nowadays, from your average Joe posting about how much they hate school to the president of the United States of America using it to insult people. With so many people using some form of social media account it is hard to imagine that it hasn’t changed the way we live our lives.  A popular use for social media nowadays is for news, twitter for example has a “moments” section that will show you important events that occurred that day. In the article Social Media Use for News and Individuals’ Social Capital, Civic Engagement and Political Participation it mentions many instances of social media being used to create / increase political movements, one case asserts that “Many commentators credit the 20,000 Canadian users who joined a Facebook group against a government-led copyright reform bill for the delay in the introduction of the bill in late 2008” (Nakwon Jung). It has never been easier to take part In political movements and social media is a big part of that , Facebook was even credited in making the Arab spring uprisings possible with Facebook groups being used to quickly organize protests. However there is also a dark side to social media and how easy it can be to spread information such as how it has been used by Isis to recruit new members via twitter. It’s not just Isis either in the article Anders Behring Breivik’s use of the Internet and social media it is revealed that “Before the attacks, he was also an active discussant on a number of mainstream and extremist Internet forums” (Jacob Ravndal). Ander Breivik being a frequent poster on “Stormfront”, a white nationalist forum, suggests that the internet may have played a part in radicalizing him towards terrorism. Social media can either be a place for fun or a place for hate it all depends on who you follow and where you post.

A major milestone in technological advancement was achieved by Tesla motors when they released their new cars that come equipped with self-driving technology. The Tesla motor company has mentioned that this self-driving technology isn’t meant to be used completely as an autopilot and the driver must always have their hands on the wheel or the car will gradually slow down to a stop. However in the first case of accident/death related to the tesla autopilot according to Tesla motors themselves “Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.” Maybe the driver truly didn’t notice the trailer because of the bright sky but maybe he wasn’t paying as much attention as he usually would on his commute because of the added safety of the autopilot software.

It seems to me that many people are happy with how technology continues to advance towards that futuristic society that we see in the movies but they ignore the subtle danger to it hidden beneath all those benefits. As described in this exert of the book Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner “Technology demands more, not less, human work to function. And it introduces more subtle and insidious problems to replace acute ones.” He goes on to describe how a new safety feature can cause an increase in risk taking which can cause more damage than it prevents. That is how I see technology like the Tesla autopilot software; we ignore any idea of harm being caused by something new that can make our lives more convenient. We are reaching a point in our technological advancement that it is getting a bit science-fiction like, and that may seem appealing to people but now is the time that we have to pay the closest attention to new developments as they are pushing boundaries that we have never crossed before and are no doubt going to have unseen problems that can’t be worked out until they become more apparent with widespread usage. I still look forward to the future and the new tech that comes with it but I wouldn’t want to be the one beta testing it.