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Have computers really helped us?
Do people think that computer technology has really been a huge event for mankind? On a micro scale, computers help many people. But on a macro scale, are they doing anything that has really had a profound change on our society? After all, the stock market, etc. existed just fine before the advent of computers. Even if they make many things more convenient, the hassle of running and maintaining the things detracts from their overall efficiency.
There are two areas that I see where they have made a profound change:
1) Number crunching allowing us to come up with new medicines, etc.
2) Instant and broad communication.
But overall, have they really made that big a difference? I submit that compared to things like the automobile or the birth control pill, the impact of computers is much less significant.
There are two areas that I see where they have made a profound change:
1) Number crunching allowing us to come up with new medicines, etc.
2) Instant and broad communication.
But overall, have they really made that big a difference? I submit that compared to things like the automobile or the birth control pill, the impact of computers is much less significant.
Comments
In particular, I'm thinking of a Harvard study done a few years ago that found that computers, on the whole, had failed to increase business productivity.
As for landing on the moon... who cares? It was cool, but how did that affect the life of the average human?
Let's take a look at the printing press (a common benchmark for "modern civilization"). Did Gutenberg's generation really benefit the most from it? They needed to learn not only to use the tool itself, but learn to read. It really was subsequent generations, the ones that were afforded the opportunity access to books in childhood, that benefited most from the printing press.
With the current rate at which technology changes, perhaps 'the computer' is not as an extreme example as Gutenberg's printing press, but there may be a limit to the amount of learning and adaptation we, as a society, can take in one generation. The computer may be too new for the majority of us to understand the efficiencies we can gain from it. Another generation or two from now this will be drastically different. Imagine a world where virtually every person was born with a computer in their house; when technology literacy equals our current world rates for reading literacy. How then will we view the computer? I would wager that the efficiencies experienced in business will only increase as a more educated populace reaches working age.
I would also note that if technology allows people to do what used to take 8 hrs of work in 4-6hrs, it will afford that person much more time to use technology for non-work related tasks such as podcasts and forums. Depending on the measures used in the study, they may not have accounted for increased slacking off.
By the way, how do I put a link in a post but give it a different nametag instead of blindly copying the URL?
Without computers, we wouldn't have developed technology for stealth aircraft. The computation required to design them was staggering, and I doubt that humans could have done it in any reasonable span of time.
Without computers, I doubt the telephone and power systems could have scaled and continue to scale to meet the demands of increased population.
Without computers, most advanced medical techniquies and devices could simply not exist.
The deal with computers is that they can make billions upon billions of calculations in the time it takes a human to write a single numeral. It allows us to brute-force answers to computationally intensive problems that otherwise would be entirely unsolvable, and furthermore to do so very quickly. Computers free humans from those trillians and trillians of trivial calculations, so that we can instead focus on the fruits of said effort. Most people are just unable or unwilling to take true advantage of this. I expect that to change in the next two generations.
Check out some of the writings of Jay Leno in Popular Mechanics because he encounters a fair amount of that stuff.
Because of computers many people find themselves doing jobs that they would not be qualified to do if they did not have a computer with them.
As for Telco... I will not be surprised if 15 years from now POTS is dead and buried.
Yes, people are doing things with computers that they would not be qualified without computers. The most talented surgeon in the world would not be qualified to perform open-heart surgery without centuries of medical knowledge and a support staff at his back. That's the way of technology: it enables people to surpass old boundaries.
Computers have been used to release us from the need to fill our heads with knowledge we do not need on a regular basis. Why memorize physics formulae, when I can look them up on the computer? Why spend ten minutes doing math on paper when the calculator can do it instantly? A person would still need to have an understanding of physics and the math involved to actually calculate anything useful or meaningful. They just won't need to waste mental energy on the process of calculation or memorization. This allows people to spend more time thinking about the problem at hand rather than being sidetracked by tangential menial labor.
Computers don't make people stupid. They just change the world in such a way that different knowledge sets become more important than others. We're not learning less, we're learning something different.
Advancing technology, or dependence on technology, does not make people less intelligent. It's just the rising tide of technology is raising all the boats. Stupid people can use a hand-held calculator to figure out how much money they are saving at the grocery store. Brain surgeons can use a 3D MRI and a robot to perform an otherwise impossible surgery. How is the brain surgeon who can't do the surgery without the computer any different than the person who can't do math without a calculator? They aren't different at all. They are both dependent on external technology to accomplish tasks above and beyond their personal ability.
I think you are just old and jealous that you had to do hard work to accomplish things which people now accomplish with great ease. If you are really smarter than they are, then you have nothing to worry about because you will be able to take more advantage of the technology than they do, and your boat will rise higher. Technology is awesome that way.
Back in my day . . .
My point is that you need a solid base of studies without the benefit of technology so that when the zombie apocalypse comes you will be able to count the bullets on the floor while still firing at the zombie in the window.