The Computer Zone

Today is the second day of the Technology in Our Lives week long series. This all started with a single comment from my brother stating that technology was the bane to his existence. Yesterday was all about the how information has changed over the past 50 years, today’s topic is going to be about how technology has increased and decreased the quality of life around the world.

Technology has increased the quality of life for people around the world over the past century. Transportation has changed and has became much safer, quicker and more widely available. People’s ability to receive health care has increased as well as the quality of that health care and finally technology has increased productivity.

On the other hand, technology has decreased the quality of life in a bunch of different ways. Because of the increase in transportation, the amount of pollution in the atmosphere has increased a thousand fold. The advent of more dangerous technology (chemicals, bio-weapons, etc…) has created more dangerous living conditions and some people say that technology has made mankind less interactive.

Technology has Increased the Quality of Life

Many things in our lives have gotten better with advances in technology, whether it be the way we get around, how we take care of our sick or how much we can produce and how efficiently we can produce it.

Transportation
A hundred years ago humans used buggies and horses to get around from town to town. It was slow, dangerous and hard work. Horses needed to be taken care of and fed, carts and buggies broke down and it could take weeks to get where you wanted to go. Now with airplanes, trains, boats, and cars you can get to any place on earth within a day. Because of the advances in our transportation technology people have spread around the world. Back in the day, extended families would clump together. With the advances in technology extended families can now be found around the world.

Health Care
Imagine having a migraine. The pain is so searing that you need to go to the hospital. Nowadays they would give you migraine medicine and you would be on your way. A hundred and fifty years ago you would have gotten a drill through your skull. Doctors are more knowledgeable, the machines they use are more sophisticated and research is discovering more remedies than ever before.

Productivity
If you’re a University student you’re well versed with the practice of retrieving information from the Internet. Now imagine doing a paper and instead of searching the Internet you had to go to the library to find every piece of information. Now I know that a lot of people still do this but using the Internet as your one stop place for whatever you need is so much more productive than searching around a large library. The advances in computers and machinery has increased the productivity of humans everywhere. Robots now build cars in a fraction of the time that it used to take human workers.

Technology has Decreased the Quality of Life

While technology has also increased our quality of life it has in many ways, decreased it. Dangerous levels of pollution now float around in the Earths atmosphere, endangering humans, plants, animals and even the planet we live on. Warfare has become even more deadly with the advances in chemical / biological and conventional weapons. People have also become more complacent and less interactive with other people.

Increase in the Pollution Levels
As more and more cars drive around, more trains chug along and more planes fly through the skies the amount of pollution increases exponentially. As the pollution level rises, our living conditions decrease. In an effort to increase our living conditions we invent different technologies that could possibly release more pollution. At this point in time there doesn’t really seem to be an answer to this. Car companies are coming out with hybrid cars and countries are implementing laws over how much a company can pollute but it just isn’t happening fast enough. As more factories are used to make things we need for everyday living more pollutions are put into the atmosphere. Basically everything we do pollutes the air we breathe and the land we live on.

Advances in Warfare
In the War of 1812, Americans lost 2,260 soldiers out of a total number of 286,730 soldiers. This equates to a 0.78% death rate. By World War II there were approximately 16million soldiers and of those 16million over 300,000 died. This means almost a 2% death rate, which is a lot higher than the war of 1812. This is partly due to the conditions of the fight but it has a lot to do with the technology of the weapons they had back then compared to now. Back then the soldiers had muskets that fired one shot and took a long time to load. They had canons that would fire canon balls that could take out a few people. Modern warfare has nuclear ballistic missiles that can kill tens of millions of people instantly. We also have automatic weapons that can mow through people at an amazing rate. Before people had a standing chance but now, people really don’t have a chance if a country wishes them dead.

People’s Interactivity with Others
Everyday people log into their Email accounts, check their email, respond to anything they’ve received and send emails to people they haven’t talked to for a while. This is all done through the internet and without any need for human interaction. Students can now take video courses where they never even meet their professor. Bloggers take contract work where they write for people they’ve never met and will never see. This lack of interaction has a profound affect on human beings. We aren’t supposed to be isolated from other humans. We’re supposed to interact with others.

Technology has both increased and decreased the quality of life for everyone around the world. Advances in technology has helped us travel more, be more productive, and take are of our sick, but it has also made us more sick, given us the ability to kill easier, and isolated us from the rest of the human race.

But those are just my opinions, what are your thoughts on the matter? Do you think technology has, in general, increased or decreased our quality of life? What kind of path should we go down to increase our quality of life?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Tech In Our Lives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.