One of the biggest problems in society today is the fact that our technology is advancing so fast that we, as a society, are having trouble keeping up. We have extended the average life span to ever longer years, developed ways to communicate to vast numbers of people instantly and globally, and we have even successfully altered human brains with computerized circuitry. If the past 100 years are any indication then there is no telling where we will be by the year 2100.
Please bear in mind, of course, that these ideas are just my ramblings and not hard cold facts. I just think that technology is advancing so fast that we, as a whole, cannot keep up. Despite your beliefs on when and how man first appeared on Earth, it is pretty easy to conclude that after a certain number of years ours bodies begin to wear out. Recently, modern medicine has allowed people to live longer lives. But at what cost? As a society we are having issues dealing with them. Nursing homes are overcrowded and poorly staffed (my apologizes for the generalization of social workers; I know there are some great folks out there) by people who would rather be doing something else. One hundred years ago, people did not have to worry about retirement or old age because they did not really expect to have to deal with it.
And it is not just the elderly that are having to adjust. Certainly the middle-aged person struggling to learn to use a home computer would make a great example here, but I was thinking more about how children are changing to deal with our advanced technological world. Children today have instant access to everything they want and need (in general). Answering a question, for example, on nearly any subject is a internet search away. The desire to listen to a specific song, watch a favorite television show or DVD can be instantly satisfied. Because of this, keeping a child's attention for more than three seconds is a challenge. Look at how they interact today as compared to us as kids. Could you have ever imagined talking to your friends via instant texts or online? Again, I think this shows how they are being conditioned to expect instant gratification. I feel (and again this is simply my opinion) that this helps explain the abundance of 'attention deficit disorder' diagnoses. We (all of us) have grown to expect too much too quick. Want proof? Look in the 'get rich quick' section at the bookstore.
But back to the kids. I'm in my mid-40s. I remember buying my first home computer in 1982. I crashed my car and instead of getting a new one I used the insurance money to buy a TRS-80 desktop computer. It hard no hard drive and no floppy disk. No data storage at all and it only had 16k of memory. I'd be willing to bet no one reading this realizes what 16k means, but basically today's toasters had more memory. You had to type in every single line of a program to run it and when you turned the computer off, the program was gone. Anyway, my point is this. Most adults have seen the world grow and change and I am willing to bet that it continues to grow and change (assuming we don't destroy ourselves) for the foreseeable future. Can you imagine what kind of technology our kids or grandkids will get to play with? How will they deal with it? It is easy to imagine them developing in a much difference way psychologically. Not a bad way, mind you, just different.
I mentioned early something about altering human brains with electronics. Imagine a memory chip in your brain where you could store data just like on a computer and instantly retrieve it. No more lost addresses or phone numbers, no more grocery lists on paper, etc. These advancements are already here and the possibilities are endless; not only the good applications, but the bad as well. The problem, as I see it, is how do we deal with it as a society?
MH
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