Great Depression and Technology

As Albert Einstein once said â€Å"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. † Throughout the years our technology has become more and more advanced, creating more and more inventions. Modern technology has been created to fulfill every human’s needs. With such great advancements it has become convenient for our society to turn to technology for all our questions. We have not realized that day by day technology is taking over us. Many like to argue that it is not true, but if you were to take away every possible form of technology away from them, it would make living for them very difficult. Now a day, technology has played such an important role in our lives that it seems almost impossible for many of us to live without it. Being said, modern technology has produced more inconveniences than conveniences. To begin, with technology constantly advancing, many have become very reliant on it, making technology almost a necessity to a person’s everyday life. Almost everyone owns a car, a computer/laptop, a cell phone, and even higher advanced technology. Everywhere you go, people are either talking on their phone or texting, However, with so much technology being provided to us, it has made us profoundly lazy and too dependent on technology not allowing us to think for ourselves. So not only has modern technology made us lazy but also unintelligent. â€Å"Who can remember the days when you had to go to the library to do research for a research paper, had to pick up the morning newspaper to get the latest news, or had to buy a stamp and put a check in an envelope to pay a bill? In the last 50 years technology has undergone an amazing transformation. But with the emergence of the Internet, is our ability to access technology on a daily basis a good thing or a bad thing? † (Bradley). Bradley clearly states that we no longer do simple tasks on our own; we rely on technology to do them for us. We now use Google or other search engines to look up questions, turn on a televisions to see what is going on around us, and take a picture of a bill on our cell phones to pay it. â€Å"In another 50 years will we still be considered a lazy society? (Bradley). Furthermore, â€Å"Although the proliferation of communications technology has made it easier than to ever to have a conversation with or write a letter to another person, it has also rendered us more isolated. Computers have significantly reduced the amount of face-to-face interaction people once enjoyed. In place of the richness of human contact, many now settle for the comparatively pale pleasures of comp uter social networking† (Wolfe). With social medias like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, communicating with one another has become easier than ever. But this may not always be a good thing. People can easily create fake profiles and pretend to be a young man or woman when they can be a crazed rapist or murderer. Not only that but with so many social networks, cyber bullying has increased drastically. People can put whatever they want on the internet which can lower a person's self-esteem causing for them to want to kill themselves. Also, since we communicate so much over social media, it can affect our writing skills. Many people who chat online do not use proper vocabulary. For example, instead of writing okay, they abbreviate it writing OK. This causes us to begin writing in slang when we write papers for school. As a society we should learn face-to-face communication instead of over the internet. As final point, with new advanced machines being created and the machines being capable to do almost anything, there has been an increase in job elimination. Some of these jobs would include those of farm workers and factory workers. â€Å"A technology revolution is fast replacing human beings with machines in virtually every sector and industry in the global economy. Already, millions of workers have been permanently eliminated from the economic process, and whole work categories and job assignments have shrunk, been restructured, or disappeared. Global unemployment has now reached its highest level since the great depression of the 1930s. More than 800 million human beings are now unemployed or underemployed in the world. That figure is likely to rise sharply between now and the turn of the century as millions of new entrants into the workforce find themselves without jobs† (Rifkin). With modern technology taking over the jobs of farm workers, factory workers, etc, people are left jobless. And living in this economy has made it very difficult for people to find new jobs. Like Rotman said, â€Å"Rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them. † With technology constantly evolving day by day our society has to be more careful than ever to not let it take over us. Although for many of us it may already have.