Essay

Technology and the Future of Human Beings

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Course
ICT126

Institution
British Columbia Institute Of Technology (BCIT )

Since the cognition revolution of over hundred and fifty years ago in the African Savannah, homos sapiens have been apogee of intelligent life on earth. Indeed the entire known universe. However, this is about to change. Modern technology has introduced a different kind of intelligence that not onl...

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Uploaded on April 29, 2021
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Written in 2020/2021
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Technology and the Future of Human Beings

Since the cognition revolution of over hundred and fifty years ago in the African Savannah,

homos sapiens have been apogee of intelligent life on earth. Indeed the entire known universe.

However, this is about to change. Modern technology has introduced a different kind of

intelligence that not only matches human intelligence but will soon surpass it. In so doing, this

technology is changing the nature of human intelligence and resetting the course of human

history moving into the future. Artificial intelligence is bound to replace most of human labor in

the job market while online tools and platforms like google change the way human beings think

and live. Online platforms like google, and artificial intelligence are not threats to human life yet,

however, an unsupervised rise of artificial intelligence puts the status of human life on earth at

great risk.

In his article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, published on the Atlantic Daily (July/August

Issue, 2008), Nicholas Carr examines the ways in which the use of google and other online

sources of information is transforming how we think; perceive, digest, and translate information.

He begins by giving the anecdote of his own experience with reading online and those of his

close relations. “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or

something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the

memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing” (Carr 313). After years of

reading material online and being bombarded by billions of different versions the same

information at a time, he notes that his brain has been re-wired to read and digest information

differently than it did when the source of such information was books, magazines, and television.

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All these sources of information differ from google and online platforms in one way, they offer

information in a passive manner and focus on one piece of information at a time. Net on the

other hand provides the reader with an “immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of

information” at the same time (Carr 312). With this new way of passing information has come a

new way of thinking. Thus the article asserts that readers’ attention spans has been highly limited

and their minds now “expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly

moving stream of particles” (Carr 314).

Kevin Kelly, on the other hand, overlooks the way online and artificial intelligence are

changing the human brain and mind and argues for unavoidable replacement of human labor by

artificial intelligence and the benefits of it. In his article title Better than Human: Why Robots

Will – and Should – Take our Jobs, Kelly notes that artificial intelligence will replace human

labor in most fields sooner than most imagine. He argues that most people think this revolution

will be slower because they misunderstand the nature of artificial intelligence. “We have

preconceptions about how an intelligent robot should look and act, and these can blind us to what

is already happening around us” (Kelly 299). Most people expect artificially intelligent robots to

look like human beings, both physically and mentally. However, Robots like Baxter, “a

revolutionary new work-bot from Rethink Robotics”, have proved that this is not really

necessary. With this understanding, notes the author, the job of human beings now is to reconcile

our existence with that of machines. “This is not a race against the machines. If we race against

them, we lose. This is a race with the machines” (Kelly 301). For the jobs taken away by

machines, more will be created, almost in the same fashion the industrial revolution did.

Both articles present valid arguments for and against artificial intelligence. Carr takes an

individual view of this new form of intelligence. He examines closely how it will change

individual human beings: their thinking and how they perceive the world. A collection of

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