Technology: helpful or hurtful?

Technology has changed the way we live our lives for the better and the worse. Technology is mainly used to make our life easier. Using shortcuts and high amounts information available in an instant. Yet it makes us as a society lazy. As stated in Nicholas Carr’s Hal and Me “I can feel my mind changing…I cannot focus for long stretches of time”. Carr introduces the fact that technology has taken away the ability to focus on something for a long time. He states that after the introduction of technology that he cannot dive into a book “The internet doesn’t only supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.” says Carr. Throughout the story he continues to poke at the idea, that the internet shapes the way we think. What makes this so important is that this applies to everyday life as well and not with just reading a book. When kids are in class they have short attention spans and will not just sit there and learn.

Clive Thompson’s The Rise of the Centaurs focuses on the advancements in chess. Chess is known to be a game about moves, counter moves, and outthinking your opponent. Usually this game is dominated by humans because the sense of gambling on certain moves and psyching you opponent out. Then all of a sudden supercomputers became better at chess than grandmasters. This created a whole new way to play chess. When a grandmaster and a supercomputer teamed up they would call it a centaur just like a man and horse combined to create a better man these two powerhouses seemed to be an unstoppable pair. A tournament was then hosted and the winners were not actually grandmasters. The winners were two men that matched with their computers perfectly. They knew when to trust the computer and when to trust their gut and used that intuition and the speed of the super computer to dominate the chess world.

With both of these stories they both relate to the fact that technology is changing our world. One effects how our mind thinks and how much we pay attention and how the simplicity of the internet can make affect our daily lives. On the other hand The Rise of the Centaurs focuses on how technology changes what we think about simple games like chess and those who play it. It didn’t matter if you were a grandmaster what mattered is if you knew your way around a computer and knew when to trust the computer or yourself. These two stories show both sides of the impact technology has had in our life. One shows the effects technology has on making us mentally lazy and impatient. The other shows how simple it can make things and how much easier technology has made life in a positive way.