My Sixth AWA Essay — Analyze An Issue
As people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which 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.
The Issue assumes that human thoughts can be replaced by mere data crunching by the computer which is indeed fallible and laughable. This is because the use of the computer is to complement human effort and not a force to compete with human intelligence. The whole essence of having a computer is to make easier some thought and physical processes of human which are otherwise time-consuming and obscure or eccentric to a lot of people.
This position by the Author can only be acceptable in cases when people become lax with their tasks. They have no plans to grow beyond what they currently do such that a computer can easily learn what they do and do it better. But people who continue to learn and become better would be very difficult if not impossible to replace by even another human, more so a computer.
In the Software industry, it is well known that it is not about the speed of your computer that really matters but what type of life-changing ideas you can come up with for the computer to solve. It is no longer a question of if we can solve a problem, but how impressive and useful would the idea we want to solve be. There are a lot of venture capitalists out there who are looking for people who can think of problems for the computer to solve, which means that the computer in essence still expects inputs from humans. So at this stage, it would be difficult to indeed say that the computer has made our thought process depreciate, rather it has made it deeper, because we are now in a world where the better your ideas, the better your chances of succeeding.
Consider the Educational sector, availability of technology to improve education has made learning easy by providing better access to learning resources which is being used by students all over the world. Students can now learn at their own pace which is in stack contrast to traditional means of learning. This has helped a lot of students discover what their passions are and have made them become better in the society. So to them, the presence of technology has been a blessing and has created opportunities they never thought could be possible.
However, beyond considering the positive impacts of technology in our thought process, it would be important to also emphasize the areas where it is causing humans to lose their thought process. One such area is in the Social Media. A lot of people spend most of their valuable time online simply scrolling through pages of information to simply applaud or criticize based on what they feel is the right thing. These form of social media use causes people to begin to think less as humans and to rather follow whatever they see on social media. These set of people are proofs that technology can indeed influence the human way of thinking in the negative way. But people who seek to use the Social Media as a means of keeping people updated every minute are indeed on the good path of the us of Social Media.
One last aspect I would also like to emphasize where the human ability to think is also withering away is in the gaming industry. People especially kids who spend most of their valuable time playing games simply waste such valuable time which could have been used to further develop and nurture our thought process but has however being overtaken by the love for games. This does not mean that playing games makes us less human, but the indiscriminate time-wasting attitude people have developed for games has indeed caused a problem in the way we use our brain and mind to think.
Note that the Computer would always have its good sides and its bad sides based on how you use it, so if more people would spend their times judiciously while using technology, it would indeed help create a race of humans where the most cherished person is not he who has a lot of money, but he who can think better than anyone else.
