For this weeks blog post (which I know is late but I’ll go for it anyways), I’d like to discuss the current phenomenon in the fallacies of using technology for doing things that we would rather not apply ourselves to do.

The mind is a complex tool that is given to us so that we can think about ideas and processes in order to progress. But how is technology hindering this use of our mind as a tool? I understand technology is advancing and has only become more integrated in our everyday lives but isn’t it a bit much sometimes? For example, look at navigational applications and software that is so commonly used today. You hop in the car and put in the address you want to go to and an app like Google Maps tells you the step by step directions to get there. This seems great with everything laid out for you but for some reason your directions tell you to take the next exit and you want to go across four lanes of traffic in hopes that you’ll make it. Why does this occur? There are literally signs telling us how far the exits are from the points of the sign but we ignore these signs because we’d rather rely on our GPS to tell us when/where to exit the freeway. I’m not saying this is the app’s fault but rather our dependency of technology over using our own minds to think about our next move. This is just one example of how technology has hindered the mode of human thinking.

“And our skills deprive us of the force and agility that necessity obliges him to acquire” (Discourse on Inequality, p. 68). If we rely on technology to do the thinking for us, then we lose the ability to think for ourselves.

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-always-on-technology-hinder-groups-ability.html