You can capture a video, edit it, and transmit it across the globe with the cellphone in your hand. You can use your phone to explore cities, purchase a vehicle, monitor your vital signs, and do hundreds of other things. So, what’s the deal? All of those tasks used to need the acquisition of particular abilities and the resources required to carry them out. Are you making a movie? Get a movie camera and the necessary technology first. Second, learn how to operate them and assemble a team. Third, make the film. Fourth, work on the film’s development and editing—fifth, print and transfer ownership. Now, technology has taken care of all of those duties. When smartphone programmers have taken care of so much, we don’t need to understand the delicate intricacies. However, today, filmmakers have more time to concentrate on their art, and becoming a filmmaker is simpler than ever. Technology has always made us individually dumber and wiser – and collectively more intelligent. Technology has increased our reliance on others by allowing us to accomplish more while knowing less about what we do.
Notifications are essentially the drug of technology.
Our phone’s apps all want to give me alerts. It’s fantastic since they all have vital knowledge to offer to help us be more productive. Except that all I do all day is play a digital version of whack-a-mole, tapping icons with red dots to get rid of all the alerts. According to studies, continuous stimulation on our gadgets increases dopamine levels in our brains, making them act like narcotics. The issue with medicines, like notifications, is that they are challenging to refuse. It will make you feel fabulous for a short while, but it will also induce anxiety, cravings, and withdrawal. All of this is equally true of the remedy that continuous notifications provide.
Specialized expertise
Specialization allows us to excel at some activities. Still, that investment in learning — for example, how to be an ER nurse or a computer programmer – comes at the cost of other abilities, such as producing your food or constructing your own home. Specialization has moral and practical implications. Skilled employees are more likely to find employment and earn more than unskilled ones.
It’s causing us to become more illiterate.
True, technology has enabled us to do some amazing feats. We can’t deny that it has helped us to solve previously intractable issues, but all of this clever technology has rendered us stupid at its most fundamental level. We believe it is primarily due to how reliant we have become on technology for even the most basic needs.
Here’s the deal: If you don’t utilize a muscle, it will eventually be lost. Sure, it’s not strictly a muscle, but can we agree that if you stop using your brain because your watch informs you when it’s time to go to a meeting, get up, or use the restroom, you’re not becoming any wiser? The more we delegate to computers what distinguishes us as humans—our power to think, analyze, and make decisions—the less we push and develop our capacity to do so.