Our growing dependence on technology may be our greatest weakness

Here's an essay I had written for my Grade 10 assignment. I think it's still pretty relevant, and before it gets lost in time on my hard drive, I'd like to share it with you.

Our world has grown over the past hundred years in an unimaginable direction. Even though we still have to discover plentiful about this planet, we have managed to supply ourselves with bare necessities, such as food, water, shelter and security. Matter of fact, not only bare necessities, we have managed to provide ourselves by using our wit with most of the luxuries available at our disposal. However, the increase in machines within our homes themselves has a large impact on how we live our lives. Some aspects of technology have become household items, such as the television, or the fridge. Even though it seems that some are necessary to survive in this world, we may have crossed the line between necessity and luxury. In a fast-paced world such as ours, technology is present everywhere. From the time you wake up in the form of your alarm clock, to the time you fall asleep, with music or television. However, the possibilities of a breakdown are very high, and if that happened, would we be able to continue without technology? The debate remains on whether we will be able to communicate and interact with people and the world around us. [2]

For many years, technology has been present and has given us the ability to work smoothly and to produce more conveniences for daily life that make life easier and our work more productive. It has allowed us to devise machines so complicated that we don’t need to spend time redundantly performing tasks over and over again. Many things have become possible simply because of technology, such as developments of medical technologies that allow us to find cures to the rising amount of illnesses. We have made vehicles that are inherently capable of driving themselves; by researching GPS technology that is now built into devices such as our phones. We have designed airplanes so advanced that they can fly 400 passengers from point A to point B without the need for a pilot, theoretically. From a simple calculator to a supercomputer, or a TV to a theater, tech is already controlling critical systems that are necessary for us to exist in this world, such as electricity grids, business markets, and military technology. Technology lives in nearly every single thing around us, and as we move toward a system that links every aspect of our life and each system communicates with each other, there are still some considerations to be made about whether this is the right way forward or whether we should reconsider our objectives.

Despite the fact that technology has made life much simpler, less tedious, faster and accessible, it has also made us unable to work without the assistance of designed technology, and in cases where this technology has failed it has spelled pure disaster. Major outages that took place at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the United Airlines hubs that slowed trade and grounded 200 flights[1] posed as reminders to how dependent we had grown in a short while on the technology we created to ‘assist’ us in everyday tasks.

If we do not acknowledge this issue soon, there will come a point in time where everything we do, every place we visit and our entire world will be running on the crutches of technology, and while this is not necessarily a bad thing, it may mean that we will lose some of our capabilities as humans to survive and innovate as we look toward computers to process our lives for us. What’s worse is that this growing influence of technology over our lives will increase the chances of a breakdown or a malicious attack on these technologies, which will inadvertently compromise security. We have become so dependent on these simple technologies, that if we find a calculator near us, we will naturally turn to it to perform simple calculations that we could otherwise do mentally. This problem may become severe so much that we lose our mental capabilities and lose our prowess over creative thinking that has led to us to come to this point. This issue can only be diverted if we develop a more rigorous way in which we build our technologies, otherwise, we will soon be confronted with an imminent threat of fallout.

Works Cited

1. Ennis, Buck. "Growing Dependence on Technology Raises Risks of Malfunction." Crains New York Business. Crains New York, 9 July 2015. Web. 10 Jan. 2016.

2. "Have People Become Overly Dependent on Technology?" Debate.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Jan. 2016.