- As people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
One may say that general competence of human beings will be weakened as we rely more and more on technologies to solve problems. In some sense, it is undeniable that modern technologies and conveniences of life have deteriorated our abilities as independent creatures. To my eyes, however, several new types of human abilities which are unimaginable without technology come greater than the diminishment of traditional skills of ancient people.
Of course, few would disagree that we have lost several kinds of traditional powers along with our ever-increasing dependence on luxuries and innovations of modern technology. Many young doctors might be embarrassed if they were disarmed with such high-tech machines as CT or lots of sophisticated medical devices. Many old-time professors used to deplore the weakening of hand-calculation skills among scientists of new generation. Some old-aged athletes express smug about their young counterparts who are seemingly protected and armed with a range of performance enhancing gadgets and devices. At a glance, all these cases suggest we have lost several valuable traditional skills and abilities in this world of technology.
Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that technology always works against our competence as independent being. In medicine, just because of those sophisticated devices, new generation of doctors are able to detect problems in human bodies in more details including invisible nano-area phenomena, a new type of ability that old generations could never imagine. In sciences, instead of wasting time in performing repetitive simple calculations, scientists can be focused on more essential issues by virtue of saved time by computers. These and other examples indicate that technology not diminishes but expands our scope and reach of intellectual endeavors.
Moreover, the contribution of technology to our vision and ability can be observed even in arts. Because of the progress in computer-aided graphic technologies, many film directors now deliver their imaginations into surreal works. Without modern technologies, we might not have opportunities to enjoy such films as Avatar, XXXX, or YYYY. -----------------------
Many would say that modern technology tends to diminish our ability to behave autonomously and independently. In some sense, it is true that many traditional human abilities believed to be essential in human endeavors have been lost along with ever-increasing reliance on modern technological conveniences. However, in my view, this claim fails to consider a variety of improved human thinking capacities by virtue of the technologies.
Of course, it is undeniable that technologies, in some ways, vitiate our traditional powers. With regard to ((the ability to solve problems in a spontaneous manner)), most modern people seem to be inferior to people of yesterday. Boasting about his sophisticated ability of hand-calculation, my advisor habitually deplores the fact that his young students cannot solve the basic statistical problems when they are removed from computer-based statistical packets; similarly, old doctors usually complain that their younger partners cannot do some make-shifts unless they have several high-tech devices which, today, have become more important than knowledge in individual doctors’ brain. In short, our lowered ability to treat problems in an offhand manner seems to support the claim that modern technology deteriorates our thinking capacity in many ways.
Nevertheless, this does not completely negate the virtues of modern technology in improvement of our thinking powers. In ((most fields of modern arts)), despite the skepticisms of the old generation, technologies and innovations are believed to promote new types of creativity and imagination. In film industry, for instance, it is those computer technologies and graphic tools that enable the fantastic images expressed in some attractive works such as Avatar and CXXXXX realistic. Without them, film-makers’ idea and directors’ creativity might be discarded, so that audiences still watch somewhat boring, old-style movies.
Aside from increased artistic imagination, more sophisticated and reliable ((predictive powers in scientific analyses)) are also the product of the once-blamed modern technologies. Most modern meteorologists who can work with many super computers produce much more accurate weather forecasts than ever before. Doctors with advanced optometric scanners can diagnose and estimate the progresses of patients’ cancers in more details, which could not be detected old times. Though losing abilities to respond spontaneously in streets, modern doctors and scientists seem to earn totally new level of skills in prediction and estimation.
To sum, despite ~~~.
Can we say that increasing reliance on technology tends to deteriorate the ability of humans to think for themselves? In some respects, it seems true that our cognitive skills have been impoverished by everyday reliance on modern technology. However, by unfairly emphasizing the negative impacts of technology, the speaker ignores some positive aspects of technology-based decision making processes especially in terms of increase in accuracy as well as overcoming of limited imaginations.
To begin with, it is hard to deny that technology has made our cognitive skills impoverished. By increasing use of computers and calculators, people tend to show poor calculating capacities without computers. It is not difficult to see the old laugh at the poor arithmetic skills of the young. When there was no such technology as computers, people had to have more hard training in their learning and they needed to rely on their own brains inevitably. With these simple facts, one may argue that modern technologies deteriorate our thinking skills.
However, technology does not always mean the impoverishment of our thinking. It has redoubtably increased accuracy of our decision making. In modern business where a bulk of raw data used for the analysis of market trend, price variation, and raw material supply should be examined on a daily basis, it is the introduction of computer technology that realizes the efficient analysis on all of the complex and complicated raw data. With the help of the technical convenience, economic analysts today can predict the future trend and make more accurate and informed decision makings. Even in politics, with the help of the new communication technologies, citizens can vote with more accurate and lengthy information. All of them say that technology in many ways can ameliorate rather than deteriorate human thinking.
Moreover, modern technologies are beneficial to our thinking capacity in that it can facilitate our creativeness and imaginative power. In medicine where the effect of new drugs or clinical methods cannot be easily experimented on human subjects, the diverse simulation models on computer help researchers to observe the possible paths of developing diseases or curing processes, thus finally precipitate the development of innovative clinical methods. Aside from medicine, the diverse scientific fields such and astronomy, physics, and even social science benefit directly from the simulation technologies of computer. Different from the purely theoretical and mathematical methodologies, these computer simulations provide researchers with not only intellectual accessibility but also palpable creativeness.
To sum, despite the fact that reliance on technologies can reduce the direct thinking experience, both the increase of accuracy and expansion of imaginative power tell us that modern technologies can never be blamed as a negative force to our thinking capacity. Therefore, I cannot fully agree with the speaker’s assertion. Only by failing to recognize the increase of accuracy and creativeness in human thinking could one claim that modern technology is a curse rather than a blessing to our thinking and reasoning.