Question:

As people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate. Discuss to the extent you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.

Answer:

In recent years due to the advent of scientific revolution of the 21st century we have seen an immense increase in the use of technology in the day to day human life starting from the flush of the toilet in the morning till the soothing songs playing on our smartphones at bedtime. Our dependency on technology extends into various spheres of our lives from entertainment to work, from transportation to spending of leisure time. And therefore many of us will argue that with a large number of tasks being taken care of by machines we are slowly losing the genius that exists within ourselves and our own problem solving skills are deteriorating every day.

Well, the purpose of this essay is to challenge is very idea which views technology as an impediment to human development. To justify my argument I will first analyse how humans learn in their childhood, following which I will talk about how use of a technology opens up new avenues to work on and finally show how the introduction of a technical world just shifts our focus on different problems than what existed a century before.

So to start of a human being start of their learning as a child which learns by observation and experiments. And while a child before the era of technology would have learned the ways of the world by exploring the nature, by playing in the nature and observing the wonders that his surroundings posed in front of him, today a child learns a lot by pondering over technical devices like the smartphones, the television and the computer. There is no way however to prove that the learning in the first case was more enhanced than the second case. On the contrary, the learning for the child is a lot more when he uncovers the depths of smartphones or computers which are so much more than just video games and cartoons as often perceived by the masses.

Moving on to an adult's life now, there is a notion that since a lawnmower can cut all the grasses in a lawn, or a calculator take care of all of one's income tax calculations and a vacuum cleaner is more than enough to keep one's room hygienic and clean, hence humans are losing their ingenuity in solving these problems. My counter argument to this point is that for generations these have been a routine task of households and even then in many places of the world these tasks are performed in same tedious manner as it performed during the yesteryears. The techniques have not undergone a minimalistic change. This shows clearly that we have mostly remained stagnant in terms of innovation as far as our daily chores are concerned. It's only technology that has brought a radical change in this scenario. The best thing in this process is that while a person sticking to a non-technological solution would have had very small increments of learning through his or her experience, technology introduces us to a completely different world altogether. Now this person will try to figure out how this vacuum cleaner actually works and when the device goes limp, this person may have to get it repaired all by himself. Let's just pause for a minute and appreciate the amount of learning that has just happened during this process.

So to conclude the new era of technology has just transported us from a world full of crude problems to a world full of challenging problems. Humans still have an enormous amount of thinking to do, in fact humans will now have to think a lot more as he is now solving quantum mechanics rather than a simple problem of "how do I cut some grass?" Today technology has enabled human beings of solving a lot more complex problems which are challenging the human mind every day, thus uncovering its true ingenuity. If it were not because of technology, these problems would have just not appeared or have been impossible to solve, for example the problem of predicting the weather, it has too many calculations for a human being to perform and is impossible without the help of a supercomputer.

Hence I conclude my argument by saying that technology has not removed challenges from human life, it has posed novel and complicated challenges that will enhance the process of human evolution in a way never seen before.