By: Miles Fritzmather
Go is the most complex game ever made. After two moves there are around 130,000 possible moves, in chess there are only 400. In March of 2016, over a million dollars were awarded to the winner of 5 Go matches. Lee Sedol, one of the world's best Go players vs. AlphaGo, an AI made by google. After 5 games and 29 hours Lee Sedol had won just 1 of the 5 games, AlphaGo won the other 4. Humanity had lost to technology.
For anyone born before the new millennium, life has probably changed in innumerable ways because of technology. From the mobile phone to an online hub of almost infinite knowledge (the internet), there are a lot of new things happening to our world. But very rarely do people question how it might be changing us, for better or for worse.
The start of this supersonic advancement in technology and therefore change to our world can be dated to 1951, which was the year the first commercial computer was distributed. This was the first time the average person could use a computer, see what it could do, and understand it’s potential. Since then there have been other incredibly instrumental technologies, such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or (ARPANet). Which, in 1971, was the first electronic messaging system to send an email. Or Archie, the first search engine which was made in 1990.
Fast forward to 2020 and the way of life has morphed into something almost alien to a person from 30 years ago. Just think about your cell phone and how the most time you probably spend away from it is when you sleep. How technology and unimaginable amounts of data along with it have become the norm of life. The human mind can’t contain it all, humanity has gotten to the point where there is too much to know.
If you've ever been on a blog post site or any small web site for that matter you've probably been overrun with ads for products that will change you into the person you've always wanted to be. With all the ads and articles written by people with certain extreme beliefs, there's always going to be someone out there who has an answer to your question. Most of the time, there are actually multiple answers, and they all seem to contradict the last one, which makes it really hard to understand and know what's true. This seems to justify that technology is changing the human mind for the worse, but there are a lot of other good things brought to the table by technology. One of the people who would agree with that is Clive Thompson, a journalist who does stories for the New York Times, Wired, and many other journals who said in his book Smarter than you think: “It's undeniable: technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson votes yes.”
Bullets fly as you advance towards the enemy team who are currently capturing the objective, only to fall lifeless on the floor. This is a description of a video game called Overwatch. From hearing that most people might think that video games are horrific and a prime example of the problems with technology. even the president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) tweeted: “Video game violence & glorification must be stopped—it is creating monsters!” But are video games really that bad?
For almost as long as video games have been around there have been people who think they are just a tool to trick the youth into becoming murderous sociopaths but that doesn’t seem to be the case. According to Patrick Markey, a professor of psychology at Villanova University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences as of 2014, video games have reached an all-time high for games sold however violence rates are actually lowering.
So why is the media so quick to blame video games for acts of great violence such as mass school shootings? Here’s Patrick Markey again. “The fact is that it’s just easier to blame video games than actual societal problems that cause violence.”
One of the big topics that is talked about in the book Smarter than you think by Clive Thompson is the theory of multiples. The basic idea is that people very rarely come up with ideas that are completely original and because of that, it's pretty likely that there is someone else who thinks about the same things. This has been proven by many different inventions such as penicillin, oxygen, radio waves, sunspots, logarithms, the theory of conservation of energy, the list goes on and on, and now the power of multiples is in almost everything we do. A common example of multiples is on the internet, if you search up almost anything you can find someone who has decided to write about it online. Because of the internet, the world has become a place where if you own a computer (which is almost everyone) then you can post your opinions to the rest of the world and this can be a great thing because it means that people with the same interest but live tens of thousands of miles away can still work together in real time, which is amazing.
But technology is not all good, how big of a problem is the bad side of technology?
On November 9, 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected to be the president of the United States of America. Before, after, and during the election, the idea that Russia was interfering with the U.S election was widely considered to be a real possibility. The idea that the Russians interfered with an American election would be a solid argument that there are major problems with technology, however, when Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth University, was asked if the problems with disinformation were as bad as people think they are he said that the problem with disinformation at least in the 2016 election did not seem to have much effect on Donald trumps total votes.
The idea of technology seeping into politics can seem like a bad thing but there are definitely some things about politics that have been improved by technology. Two examples of this are the games, Gerrymander: Rig the election and District builder both of these are video games that help teach people about gerrymandering, the term gerrymandering is to manipulate the boundaries of (an electoral constituency) so as to favor one party or class, google dictionary, and is a huge problem all over the world but especially in new york.new yorks elections are so rigged that it's almost impossible to win an election against the current holder of that office, from 2004 to 2010 only 4% of people in office lost to someone who ran against them. In 2010, when District builder was released Costas Panagopoulos a professor of political science at Fordham university at New York, the head of the game, held a competition to see if some amateur college students could make fairer districts than the people who get paid to do it, and they could. Districts that used to look like “Abraham Lincoln riding a vacuum cleaner” now were normal squares. The online app showed new people how to make fair districts and what gerrymandering was. Technology had made people more informed and when it comes to politics that’s one of, if not the most important thing.
What would you do if you knew you were about to have a baby and you and your wife were both speech scientists interested in how babies learn language? If you’re Deb Roy, You set up a system of cameras all throughout your house so that you can record every moment that the baby is in the house for the next two years. This might sound crazy but it is not as bad as you would think, they have the cameras to stop recording after 10:00 pm and they can manually shut it down for as long as they want, they also have an “oopsie” button which allows you to delete as far back as you want. But as time went by the implications of recording your house became much bigger than just the babies speech, by the end of the two years Deb Roy made a 3d model of his house where he could fly around through his house as he fast forwarded through or went back in time, some people though have taken it even farther, they call themselves, Life-loggers. Gordon Bell, a Life-logger has outfitted himself with a camera necklace that takes a picture every 60 seconds and records almost every conversation. The concept is that at the age of 85, it’s hard to remember everything, he also has made it so every web page he visits and every email he sends and retrieves and even his phone calls are recorded.
Memory is very mysterious but without it, we lose all personality and we lose the ability to learn and grow and teach, but with the price of storage becoming exponentially lower and that almost every electronic has a camera and audio recorder, we are able to remember more about our lives and therefore ourselves.
With the advancements in technology, the average person’s life has become easier in so many ways, from amazon to the smartphone and the things that have scared us most when looked at closely, don’t seem as bad. Now by no means is technology only an improvement, in terms of other major inventions electronics are an incredibly new one and for that reason should be treated with caution but the idea that it is going to destroy us all just doesn’t seem to be true, with all new things there are challenges but that is how we as a civilization have evolved, by confronting problems and creating new amazing things to improve the next generations life. Humanity has not lost, it’s found one of the most powerful tools ever.
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