It is the end of the semester. Most courses have a project due sometime this week. My roommate, who is working on a simulation project, told me of an incident that got me wondering. For his research, he needed to find out how many people visited a certain coffee shop each day. Upon asking the cashier at the shop, she proceeded to tell him that the daily income was $3,000 and the average price of a coffee was three dollars. Then she took out a calculator and divided 3,000 by three and told him they get about 1,000 customers a day. Have we reached a stage in technology that we need to use a calculator to divide 3,000 by three?
During the Thanksgiving sales, I bought a lot of digital organizers to give as gifts to my cousins. Each package had a bright red sign on the cover that read, "Tip calculator included." Curious to find out what a tip calculator is, I opened a package and tried it. The tip calculator lets you input the bill amount and the tip percentage. It will then output the tip amount. Can a calculator, which was also part of the organizer, not be used to do this? Are we not smart enough to do percentages on a calculator, or better still, on our own? Some tip calculators I found later had more advanced features. If you input the number of people splitting the bill it will divide and tell you how much each person has to spend. Apparently, it is such a useful tool that it had to be advertised separately.
From having the machines calculate change at restaurants, using organizers to remember birthdays, using cell phones to store phone numbers, are we slowly losing our dependence on our own intelligence? Are these devices helping to make our lives easier and more convenient, or are we slowly letting them dominate? Can we go back to the days when we used to know how to do arithmetic using just our fingers and our brains? Can we go back to the days when we used to remember special days and dates without a reminder popping up in our organizers? I ask this with the utmost guilty conscience.
It isn't fair to just criticize this infusion of technology into our lives. As we progress further into the future, the devices and gadgets really help us find our way. A working day is getting shorter and shorter, and the amount of work needed to be done is getting larger and larger. The Internet has played a pivotal role in shaping the world, and as citizens of this global revolution, it is becoming increasingly necessary for us to be constantly wired to a network. Or should I say unwired? Wi-fi (wireless-fidelity) is the buzz word right now. Wireless networks are mushrooming everywhere.
On my recent trip to New York, I was able to sit in Bryant Park and surf the net. My PDA picked up four different wireless networks that I could logon to. I checked my e-mail, I chatted on MSN messenger and I recharged my phone card. It felt like having the world at my fingertips, right in the middle of New York. I also came across a Global Positioning Device (GPS) and was amazed at its usefulness.
I believe it is impossible to get lost with such a device. Combine it with any standard map software, and it tracks your movement in real time and even gives you accurate directions to your destination. With voice capability enabled, it will tell you when to turn right and when to slow down, as the road may be slippery. It is a God's gift to those of us who don't know north from south.
These are just a few examples of the usefulness and the abuse of technology. If used right, it will make our lives simpler. There is no point fighting the revolution and claiming it is against human intelligence. A right balance has to be reached. Kids have to be taught to use pencil and paper to do simple arithmetic calculations. The multiplication tables, addition, division, percentages, ratio and proportion should all be concepts we remember learning have to be reintroduced into our daily lives. We should try to make a conscious effort to use our natural ability as much as possible and leave only the really difficult problems to the programmers and developers to help us with.
The world chess champion Gary Kasparov played a four game tournament against X3D Fritz, the most advanced chess playing computer with algorithms capable of analyzing more than 5 million positions a second. He drew two games, lost one and won one. The match ended in a draw. It was a perfect finish to all those believers and non-believers of technology. A computer can only be as good as a human. We can let them annihilate our everyday thinking and surrender ourselves completely to it, or we can use them as allies and still keep our edge over them.
Either way, we have to recognize that technology is here to stay; only the level of usage is our choice. As for me, I have my eyes set on more gadgets for Christmas. Friends, relatives are you listening?
