Ян (ahiin) wrote,

Humans and machines – who is in control?

В продолжении английских штудий, получил задание написать статью на вышеозначенную тему. Получилось чуть длиннее, чем нужно, но в пределах допустимого.

Article nuevo #2, revisited.
416 words.

Sticking your neck out and venturing a prediction about the future is usually not worthwhile. Otherwise, the author of this article would find better ways of spending his time, like selling and buying stocks, rather than ruminating about the human-machine relationships. As Nils Bohr once said: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. Yet some current trends in the field are indisputable. One can safely assume that the human and the machine certainly have a joint future together. Yet does this future look bright?

The history of the human civilization is by all means a history of the machine. One can say that a flint axe of the Neanderthal man wasn’t much of a machine per se; still, it was the first rung of the great technological ladder that ultimately led to our beloved iPhones. Of course, each and every machine is a creature of human mind, a product of the very enquiring intelligence and ingenuity that make us humans in the first place. However, it is strikingly obvious how much we grew to depend on the gadgetry around us. Much of the XVIII century population would definitely survive in the wild with nothing but a knife while our contemporaries would perish today sitting in a traffic jam without a smartphone.

There is no doubt that this dependence will strengthen further. Hand held gadgets, which make some shallow minded observers question sometimes the human lordship over the machinery, represent a mere tip of an iceberg. Seen from a broader perspective, the machine means efficiency of technology and the very survival of the human race. For example, food production is based on machines and they are indispensable in the field. There is no way back, whatever those ecology-obsessed pastoralists may or may not think of. The human society grows, evolves and changes in time and machines are bound to fall in line with that. Of course, advances in technology tend to multiply numbers of useless human drones that have already infested our society but this is the side effect of any social, not necessarily technology-based, improvement.

To sum up, technological progress, as well as any change in society, bears seeds of good and evil alike. Barring the ridicule of “machine uprising”, there are still a lot of some justified and many unjustified reservations about human-machine interdependence. Yet nowadays it is obvious that any further progress of the human is only possible alongside the progress of the machine, leaving no room for any sort of modern Luddites.
Tags: cpe, английский язык

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