WHO NEEDS IT?

 

WHO NEEDS IT?

I think it is fair to say that the majority of the folks reading my blog were born before the advent of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ Many of you, like myself, were born before cell phones and computers were in everyday usage. Charles Lindbergh thought that  “The evil of technology was not in technology itself; Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical ingenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, our sense of personal accountability."

So, I think old Charles was onto something in that our current technology is removing us from developing closer relationship with one another. Look at what we are dealing with on a daily basis, cell phones, computers, television, cameras of every shape and size. Today I am besieged with advertisements for a ‘bird buddy’ that will allow us to see what each bird is doing when they come to our feeders to eat. I already know what they do, they stick the birdseed in their little beaks and fly away to poop on our cars. We have cameras that tell us if anyone is on our property and if they ring our doorbell. We can be in China and our phones will tell us who is on our front porch. We get the weather reports for the entire world from a multitude of sources. Most of it is useless since it changes by the hour, but we still look at it, don’t we?

 

Our ovens talk to us and tell us when we need to come and take out the pies or cakes. I have seen refrigerators that have computer screens to tell us what items are out of date or what we need to buy. What happened to a plain old pad and pencil for a shopping list? I will admit that the GPS in my car has been one of the greatest inventions ever. Moses could have certainly used it and would have saved himself forty years of wandering around the desert. Paper maps are strictly from the devil himself in my opinion.  

 

I was wondering if anyone compiled a record of the injuries caused by walking and texting on your cell phone. Well, Bunky guess what? The Readers Digest reports that over 11,000 people are injured each year in this country by walking and fooling with their cell phones at the same time. This should be a lesson to all of us that cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. The National Safety Council estimates that cell phone usage causes 1.6 million accidents a year in the good old USA. They also say they think this is a severely underreported number since the majority of people will not admit that they were driving and using their phones at the same time.

 

So, my question is simply this: since the invention of the internet and cell phones, have our lives vastly improved or have our lives gotten worst? I think we need to do a Ben Franklin evaluation of all of this. Yes, we have seen many things greatly improve our lives such as medical devices and medical discoveries. We are able to communicate with anyone, anywhere at little or no cost. We can obtain vast amounts of information about virtually anything at any time we like. No more trudging down to the library to look up some needed facts. But we do seem to have increased the gap between each other at the cost of face-to-face conversations and discussions, haven’t we? We definitely need to not be on our phones when we are walking or driving. We also should shut them down when we enter into a conversation with our kids or friends. Phones and computers have a purpose just like a hammer, but they are tools, nothing more, nothing less and should not be the central point of our lives.

 

See you next week---Peary Perry