Technology is practically everywhere now; in fact, it is in pretty much everything that humans now do. The device that wakes a person up in the morning—an alarm clock; the machine that prepares his coffee; the machine that toasts his bread; the machine that cooks his food, washes, dries, and irons his clothes; brings him up and down a building; the machine that lets him communicate with key people in his life in an instant; the machine that drives him to and from work and home; all of these are products of technology.
In general, technology affects our lives by making it easier to do almost everything, if not all things, that used to be tedious and tiresome to do. Technology has given birth to machines and computers that perform massive tasks, calculations, and computations every single day and one of these machines and computers’ difference from human beings (because humans too can calculate, compute, and perform sophisticated every day and occupational tasks) is that these products of technology can work and stay up without stopping. These machines are practically inexhaustible compared to humans who are more subject to exhaustion and even wear and tear .
Now, we are living in an era called the digital era or the age of information technology. Today, technology can be seen as one of the important aspects of a normal person’s life, especially with the advent of social media and social networking sites and platforms. Even the oldest forms of human interactions are now being performed with the aid of technology. Technology these days are playing a continuously larger role on the lives of humans; large enough that most people today would not be able to imagine how their everyday life would go on without technology and the products of it.
This only shows how dependent humans have become on the assistance that technology has brought. Technology was never meant to make humans too lazy to do the things that they can do before even without any help from a machine or a computer; it was merely meant to make them more productive. However, according to recent studies, products of technology, thanks to the way how they can make an entire production line exponentially more efficient, are continuously replacing human workers. The jobs, even the sophisticated and highly delicate ones, that before were only doable by humans, are being filled in by machines and computers, both of which are undisputable products of technology. While it does makes sense from a businessman’s point of view to replace as much human workers as possible with machines and computers, such business-oriented decision can make huge impacts on the society. If all companies and enterprises would do the same, the world’s labor market would surely be the one who would take the direct hit. Worldwide unemployment rates would certainly rise and some state economies may suffer from the imbalance. This is just one of the potential drawbacks of technology and the products of technology. Nonetheless, there are a lot of ways how technology can positively affect our lives. In fact, there can be a lot of ways how we can let turn technology into a blessing. People would just have to think what to do and not to do with it.
Works Cited
Dreyfus, H. and C. Spinosa. "Further Reflections on Heidegger, Technology, and Everyday." Kompridis, N. Philosophical Romanticism. New York: Routledge, 2006. 265-281.
