Technology is a funny thingamajig. Through every technology breakthrough man has gained an edge or advantage over other species or elements of nature, or so he thought. The early Homo Habilis who used tools for hunting, or the Homo Sapien who built fire to protect himself from dangers of nature during Paleolithic period of Cenozoic era, might have not thunk that they achieved a technological breakthrough but in fact these are the milestones that defined the rest of human evolution. There are people who get all bent out of shape about how technological advancements have helped mankind reach the pinnacle of evolution and placed us at the top of food chain etc., etc., but as usual we agree to disagree.
There are technologies that enabled/aided humans to achieve excellence, like airplane, traveling around the world is faster, easier (not considering the security checks at the airports), efficient. In the beginning, it was limited to people who had to have the right amount of aptitude and attitude to learn the proper use of technology.and usually it involved a considerable amount of effort. Needless to say, people who did not qualify, could not use it and people who considered it a complicated effort stayed away from using it.
These technologies lacked business viability in the sense that they did not appeal to the masses. Clearly the standards for usage of technology have to be set lower and lower for it to appeal to the masses, so that they sell huge quantities and earn obscene profits. This is where you throw your hands up in the air, roll your eyes, turn your head sideways in disbelief and accuse me of discriminating. Let me explain.
Driving - Over the years, technology breakthroughs in automobile industry, like power steering, power brakes, Auto Shift, ABS with EBD, cruise control, roll over mitigation, made it a lot easier and enabled people to drive cars who otherwise would have stayed away from driving. I have three accounts of stupid accidents that could have been avoided if the cars that involved in the accidents had manual shift instead of an auto shift. I will mention just one and for my own safety sake, the driver's name and the gender of the driver will not be mentioned.
The driver has pulled the car into the parking lot and the car came to a complete stop. Then the driver noticed that it was not parked properly between the lines. To increase visibility, the driver pulled the seat forward, which in turn moved the driver's body in the forward direction, which sent a chain reaction to the foot which was happily resting on the accelerator ("gas pedal" as they would call it), and the foot pinned the accelerator to the floor, and the power of the engine enabled the car to jump over the divider, climb uphill, and crashed into a tree. Again, thanks to technological breakthroughs like seat belt and airbags, the driver survived, but the car did not.
An advertisement of Mercedes Benz features a certain big shot of a certain firm talking about how he was driving and did not see the traffic before him coming to a halt, but his car sensed it and stopped automagically without the driver's involvement. While others think, "WOW What an amazing technology!!!" my mind thinks, "WOW What a moron!!!". In fact I think the tag line of that advertisement should be " Mercedes Benz, enabling morons to drive cars and live to tell their stories since 1926".
I shudder at the thought of technology invented by humans getting more smarter than the humans who use it, while others are amazed by it. The technology gets smarter and smarter, enabling people to make least use of their brains, making them dumber and before you know it, The Terminator is sent from the future to kill Sarah Connor.
