Is technology the downfall of humanity?

[BenJD]

5 hours ago, Woodworker1968 said:

To tweak your post a bit, I think you mean sociological, not evolutionary.

 

One case in point is burn care. Nowadays we have the medical technology to save people with close to 100% 3rd degree burns, and doctors are not just asking "can we save this person", but "should we save this person?" Someone that badly injured will never be restored to their pre-injury condition because they'll likely need years of physical therapy to regain some quality of life. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to live any longer if I was in that position.

 

Another case in point is robot ethics. We can make robots do all kinds of things, but should we give them sentience if we're just building them to fight our wars for us? I don't think even a machine should be put in a position like that.

 

A third is cancer therapy. We know about things like Hayflick limits, checkpoint inhibitors, and monoclonal antibodies, yet—there's no way to sugar-coat it—we just let people die if they can't pay. I can only venture that this is due to some deep-seated elitism.

Those are all fine points but I did mean evolutionary change.

 

For example the way people overeat. Your brain will tell you to eat as much food as possible because food is scarce and hard to come by. You need to eat as much as you can get your hands on as quickly as possible. Maybe a predator will come along and attack you if you take too long or maybe a competitor for the scarce resource will come along. Primitive thinking basically.

 

I asked a nutritionist why junk food tastes so good if it is bad for us. It would make more sense for our brains to resist the junk food and make it taste bad. Her response was that junk food has very high energy, that is unusual in nature, our brain tells us we have found some kind of rare magical high energy food and we must eat as much of it as we can so as not to waste this unique opportunity. Of course most of us can buy as much junk food as we could eat and this impulse is generally wrong.

[Sherlocks]

1 hour ago, BenJD said:

Those are all fine points but I did mean evolutionary change.

 

For example the way people overeat. Your brain will tell you to eat as much food as possible because food is scarce and hard to come by. You need to eat as much as you can get your hands on as quickly as possible. Maybe a predator will come along and attack you if you take too long or maybe a competitor for the scarce resource will come along. Primitive thinking basically.

 

I asked a nutritionist why junk food tastes so good if it is bad for us. It would make more sense for our brains to resist the junk food and make it taste bad. Her response was that junk food has very high energy, that is unusual in nature, our brain tells us we have found some kind of rare magical high energy food and we must eat as much of it as we can so as not to waste this unique opportunity. Of course most of us can buy as much junk food as we could eat and this impulse is generally wrong.

 

 

 

Junk Food has a lot of excess salt and sugar. Humans bodies like salt and sugar because it gives you energy. If you have low salt and sugar you get sick and its not healthy at all. However, foods like canned soup, ramen, chips have large excessive amounts of it and we don't really need all of that at once. The reason people develop diabetes is because you have had so much excess sugar that your body decides "well you are eating a lot already, I guess I have to stop producing sugars". People also flavor candy to taste like things like grape, strawberry, bananas because those have sugar in them already. In fact, most things you eat have sugar it's just to what degree. It would be stupid for your brain to NOT crave salt or sugar because YOU NEED sugar and salt to survive. 

 

The problem has nothing to do with eating excess when you eat junk food. You can eat a bag of chips and not really be eating much. However, if it has huge amounts of salt in it eating too much of the item is going to be very bad for you. A bag of chips might not be very filling and have low calorie intake but high sodium. So you are going to have to eat a LOT of chips to feel full but have 20X the salt that is required for daily intake. That does not at all mean you "Overate". It means you ate junk but it has salt/sugar. The problem has nothing to do with HOW MUCH you eat, or your brain being programmed incorrectly. You in fact might need a bag of chips once in awhile. 

 

[SithAzathoth WinterDragon]

Although we rely on technology and it keeps getting better, I have noticed how we DO rely on it compared to when we used our wits and navigated. I do believe soon we all will only rely on technology, I see that it will happen in the medical field and it might happen with the future of surgeries. Medicine has advanced through the generations since the 1800's and still is advancing up the ladder. We're already controlled by technology as it is.

[Perissodactyla]

Humans are the primates that use technology/tools to accomplish tasks and goals of survival and enjoying life.

 

Humans and technology are inseparable. Technology is what humans DO.

 

 

 

[SorryNotSorry]

Again... in a nutshell, technology has outpaced sociology.

[Pramana]

Without technology, we wouldn't be able to support anywhere near the world's current population level.

[Sherlocks]

On 2/16/2017 at 6:29 PM, NerotheReaper said:

Well while technology might have its faults here and there, but it is pretty amazing how far we have come. Smart phones are computers in our pockets, when back in the day computers would take up entire rooms. Now we all carry them in our pockets basically. Technology and the Internet is what allows us all to communicate with each other even across the world, that is pretty cool. Technology is also pretty helpful for students, doing research is a lot easier instead of looking through the large encyclopedias that could kill a small child with how much they weighed.

 

Yeah technology isn't flawless, but I wouldn't say it is "the downfall of humanity", humans been screwing things up for years even before technology. They also have been terrible before all this cool technology. 

I'm not talking about the environment but mankind

[Doctor13]

It very well could be...too much of a good thing, you know. 

[Guest]

Poverty will always be a part of society, as long as greed is present within it. No amount of technology, can fix this. 

You could go as far back in history as you wish. You will not find an era, without it. 

 

Heck, you will not find an era, without slavery, as well. 

 

Technology cannot function, without a human mind behind it. 

 

Kind of like credit cards, and debt. Well, there is a greedy bank, behind deciding to use this, to make high profits. An average bank, will profit to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, per person (within your lifetime), simply based on fees and interest payments. To say its the credit card's fault, would be silly. You have pushy banks, "allowing" you to have higher credit on your cards, knowing you'll take that much longer to pay--lining up their pockets, tenfold. 

 

Its not technology sending jobs overseas, where employees could be paid less. Especially so, considering the dire conditions some of these people work in.

 

Perhaps social media can be blamed for ironically enough--making many less social, however. 

 

However, any true downfall in humanity, will always be self-inflicted. 

 

This of course, being the main reason the world is cold. 

 

Most will be out for themselves, in the game of survival. Greed, the plight for power and self-preservation. When you have the smallest percentile of society holding the keys to the greatest power it has, you start to see a part of the problem. 

[orangecat]

Capitalism/ privatized ownership is what destroy the good in humanity. Don't wrong me I am not a communist. Technology is the best thing that human ever come up given that if everyone have the same level of access to it. Sadly capitalism prevented that quite successfully. I think people often heard of the huge medical bill in the USA. The technologies are there but seems out of touch for the poor and less fortunate people.

[SorryNotSorry]

I think both of you are right on those counts. I think the more power a person has, the more a God complex will grow on them. Then they start making decisions which they think are best for us, regardless of how much better we may know ourselves.

 

In that situation, if you're a pretty powerless individual who's a member of some disliked minority, well... you can figure that out for yourselves. Those who enjoy playing God certainly don't want people with my mentality trying to use technology as a tool to level the playing field.

[Zacharie]

No, is just a bump like all technological advances have shown us through history. Many will get affected by it in a negative way but that's to be expected.

[Sherlocks]

On 2/16/2017 at 8:43 PM, sculapius said:

Uh, dude, your original post doesn't address how technology will be the downfall of humanity. It's a post about money, and the current economic and political system used in most developed nations of the world (capitalist democracy). That... doesn't really relate to technology.

I talk about how it is the downfall. The economy is based on sales. Technology has made everything so easy and made humans incompetent and lazy. You don't need to use your brain to figure stuff out anymore since technology does everything. Economy sells what you want or need. This is all interconnected. It's not just about the economy but the economy is connected to this problem.