The Role of Technology in Improving Society

In recent years, the wave of technological advancements that have been drowning society in blood and tears have been spreading not unlike a plague to other countries, that were surely better off living without a technological tumour in their side, eating away at the social structure that originally made a country a more peaceful land, and a prime example of this would be conflict minerals in the DRoC, and how people are being close to enslaved so that the rich warlords can sell the ores and minerals to apple, Samsung, Sony etc. for their phones. Technology has both indirectly and directly killed millions of people, almost all of which can be traced back to the First World War, which incentivised many technology companies develop new things, at a faster rate than ever seen before. All of these large scale wars have shaped the course of human existence forever, providing us with the atom bomb, nukes, deadly militarized gasses such as Zyklon B and countess other weapons of destruction. It could be argued that it has also saved and created the possibility of millions of lives in the past and potential billions more for the years to come.

This argument does have some validity to it, but in what world does sacrificing hundreds of millions now because of Americas determination to invade and control the eastern oil powerhouses to create “peace and security”, to end up having only a chance to save billions more over the course of humanity's existence have any place in our society?Does that not sound similar to what the Nazi’s originally claimed to be doing with their ‘experiments’, on the Jewish people? In order to prevent such horrors from being inflicted upon the world again, as a collective, we must not allow ourselves to be sucked into the self-fulfilling prophecy, the wheel that goes round and round repeating itself. Day by day, it takes over our lives. Everywhere you look- technology. Bank? Machines control almost everything. Shopping? The majority of people use online shopping to get their groceries delivered directly to their home, as well as clothing too. How long is it before you walk into a shop and everything is done through robots and AI, before you order something online and it is delivered by a self-driving truck, taken to your door by an android? And what do we do when one of these machines programming becomes corrupt, when a ‘self-learning’ robot takes in all of the internet records, all of government records, and decides that in order to help the world, it should be cleansed of humans. What do we do then, when it shows every other AI and robot the same ‘truth’, and a third world war is started, technology that we created ourselves attempting to slaughter billions and billions of lives? As Einstein once said, “I know not what weapons WWIII will be fought, but WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones. ” This shows that the idea of annihilation of society as we know it is not a recent idea, but simply an idea we have come closer to by each passing year ever since the genius of the modern world’s greatest genius uttered the famed words. Of course there are benefits that technology can have for us too. It has given us access to many helpful services in healthcare, one of those being the Electronic Health Record, otherwise known as the EHR.

The EHR helps us to get more efficient healthcare for patients as a doctor would not have to go look through hundreds of thousands of records just to find the records of someone who has had a case of an ingrown toenail or something equally as menial. Or, it could save a doctor or nurse precious time in saving the life of someone that has a very discrete injury that they aren't accustomed to treating. In short, the EHR has the ability to allow a healthcare practitioner to gain access to your health records. Surprisingly, in 2009 only 16% of US hospitals were using this system, and how around 85% of them use it. However one main thing that bothers people is the lack of privacy that this would provide people. It would mean that all of their medical records are available to any doctor, but more importantly if this system is hacked it could result in millions of cases of possible identity theft. It is very high risk. Another major benefit that technology has had is in education. To paraphrase what a writer said in an article on ‘E Learning Industry’, ‘The future of the education system could be determined by the development of future technology. ’ This statement alone says a lot about the links between technology and education.

For example, without accessible technology such as the internet and computers, it would have taken me a lot longer to research all the information and facts for this essay. Nowadays, almost all students, me included, use the internet for almost all of their homework, research, projects and so on. This is backed up by a survey taken by ‘LAT’ in 2001, that “Seventy-one percent of middle school and high school students with Internet access said they rely on the electronic technology the most in completing a project” (http://articles. latimes. com/2001/sep/02/news/mn-41325). And comparing those figures to a recent survey by “Search Engine Land”, show that a phenomenal ‘94 percent of U. S. teachers say their students equate “research” with using Google or other search engines’. (https://searchengineland. com/teachers-say-students-equate-research-with-using-google-138542) that’s a 23% increase, in just 16 years! This shows how severely students rely on the internet to find things out, and for almost all their school research. So imagine something happens that causes all of that to be unavailable anymore. Students would be completely unable to complete essays, assignments, homework and so on; it would have a devastating impact on their educational life. But if we never had this kind of technology to begin with, we would still be accustomed to using books for our research, and actual, tangible source of information. It would also make people less reliant on technologies for their everyday life. So in conclusion, if we did not have these technologies in education to begin with, it would not have any kind of severe or negative outcome; it would just make students more accustomed to reading, at the small expense of it taking more time to research, but further developing our minds for the better. However, the two listed benefits maybe be, as the word suggests, helpful to society for the most part, there are also many problems that society are victims of from technology. One of these key problems is social media, and the psychological problems it can cause. Over 40% of the world's population use social media, according to research conducted by the BBC (http://www. bbc. com/future/story/20180104-is-social-media-bad-for-you-the-evidence-and-the-unknowns).

This means that over 3 billion people use Facebook, twitter, snapchat etc. every day! One of the main problems that social media can cause is anxiety. In a study by ‘science direct’, compared to people who use 0-2 different social medias a day, people who use 7-11 different social medias had significantly higher odds of having increased levels of both depression, and anxiety. This shows how social Medias can have severe impacts over an extensive use of them daily. Another impact it can have is blue light. Blue light is the almost glaring artificial light that your phones display, and it can cause some large problems for you. In a study by the university if St. Pittsburgh, they asked over 1700 18-30 year olds about their sleeping habits, and how much they used technology before going to sleep. In the study, they found a deep connection between using a device which emits blue light before going to bed, and the amount of sleep they received - or lack thereof. Is a very important issue, and companies are now actually developing different ways to help with his. One way is a ‘blue light filter’ that is an option that you have to use on most post 2015 released Samsung phones. It helps to emit all light except the mentioned blue light, and so far it has been very successful in completing its task, as many users have reported it makes their eyes feel less strained, and they get a better night’s sleep after using it.

However, the majority of companies have not made any effort to implement this service, nor do they intend to. So to conclude, technology may make our lives significantly easier in some ways, but the cost of these benefits may not always be worth it. Students nowadays have plentiful opportunities to learn, and to connect, and make our jobs much easier by using it, and much more. But with each advantage comes a potential cost. When we understand these costs, we can try to minimize them. If we can do this we may be able to use technology more efficiently. However, as a species we will always use positive things for negative things, like when Rutherford split the atom and we used it to make nuclear bombs. This, as well as many other examples in our history, proves that due to our destructive nature technology will eventually destroy our society, not save it.