Blog post 8: To make life simpler

Technology: the easy way out?

By Yves Wienecke
March 3, 2019

Technology for efficiency

Technology, in terms of any type of tool used to facilitate completing an action, has existed for many years. Whether it be a cellphone to a bicycle to just a stone on a stick, technology makes finishing tasks easier. Quite obviously, technology is a great and important factor in determining the success that a person or civilization is able to achieve.

Cultivation tools for preparing land to grow and farm certain types of crops are responsible for creating a stable foundation for a healthy society. Technology also processes food and helps in verifying the quality and cleanliness of food. Machines facilitate the process of separating raw crops to its edible compopnents, cleaning food, and packaging food to ship out to grocery stores. Without technology, it would be impossible to sustain cities at their curreny capacity.

In China, oracle bones are one of the first forms of written technology. While buying sticky notes or printer paper can be done in a matter of seconds, writing on bones or hand preparing paper to write on is a long, laborous, and time intensive process. Writing is an important form of communication that scales to a large audience with technology, which greatly simplifies and speeds up the process of spreading information.

A more obvious form of technology arives in the form of transportation. Rather than walking miles upon miles to reach a certain destination, people found that riding horseback was much more efficient and allowed for carrying heavy loads over long distances. Nevertheless, this form of transportation had many limitations and lead many to a slow death of dysentery, which is not common for people using bicycles and mobile vehicles. Truck drivers are able to ship products to a customer from all around the country in a matter of days, whereas the process may have taken up to months in earlier years.

Clearly, technology is important, and better technology often equates to a better life. But has technology advanced to the point where life becomes too easy? Rather than giving society a boost and improvement, is technology a cheat code that takes the fun and enjoyment out of life? These questions are common amongst those who struggled and toiled without technology - a reasoning that technology makes things too easy, therefore success is not a product of hard work and thus not something to be proud of.

Technology for simplicity

Technology is useful not only for making processes quick and easy, but also in reducing the complexity of the problem at hand. A long time ago, the problem of keeping food good for a long time lead to technology used for refrigerating food as well as fermentation and salting. Salted meat and fish has a much longer lifetime and by keeping food cold underground, perishable produce can last longer than just a few hours. Later, people had to fetch ice from local ice rooms or convenience stores in order to keep their food cold. The refrigerater simplifies this entire process by just keeping the food cold - no need for digging holes in the ground or hauling large bags of ice across town.

Hand washing clothes and hanging them up to dry is a long and laborous process. It requires getting water, soap, scrubbing clothing in a special device, cleaning off the soap, dealing with the dirty water, and then waiting hours for clothing to hang dry in a sunny place with wind. A washing machine and dryer simplifies this process by magnitudes. Now, doing laundry consists of separating clothes by color, throwing it in the washer with some detergent, and then tossing it in the dryer. This entire process lasts up to only two hours!

Going back to the example of transportation, automobile technology further simplifies cars. In earlier years, driving manual was the method for conducting an automobile. However, it is notoriously difficult and stressful to pick up - it’s like a minigame while driving! With automatic cars, changing gears happens, well, automatically and this takes away much of the complexity from driving.

By making complex tasks simple, these tasks become achievable by a wide range of people and much safer. Technology makes success more accessible to people who have disabilities or are learning. Looking at technology from this point of view, simplification of technology is an overwhelmingly positive influence on society.

One step too far

Regardless of the benefits of simplifying tasks and life using technology, there are some areas where simplifying technology can produce a negative effect, which may lead to more harm than good. Taking a look at how computer science students learn to program at PSU, they begin by using vim to develop C++ programs. These are two fairly difficult things to learn, and without the use of an IDE, it feels like learning how to walk and talk once again. There are many IDEs and programming languages that greatly simplify this process, but these tools don’t allow students to gain a deep understanding of the details and innerworking of how code works and interacts with hardware. For some, this is alright, but it is a sacrifice in simplicity over performance, customizability, and learning. A weakness of this argument is that this can be taken to an extreme - learning C instead of C++, learning Assemly instead of C, and even learning circuit boards and electricity currents rather than Assembly. Evidently, simplification is quite useful, but to what extent does programming become too simple?

There are many tv commercials that use technology as a way to sell a product that may be useless. Take, for instance, machines that claim to lead to a great workout, but do little to actually get the heart rate up. I think of the shake weight, the ab belt that ‘vibrates’ you into shape, and other as seen on tv workout tools that don’t acutally do anything. People are looking towards technology to simplify complex problems like obesity and staying in shape, but it does nothing other than take money and waste time.

Recently, I’ve been seeing an advertisement on Youtube come up now and again that baffles me. It is an advertisement for a software that claims to write essays in minutes. The ad begins with a guy complaining about having to write a 1000 word essay, and explaing that he hadn’t even began the essay. This is not at all a hard task - such essays can be completed in a few hours. But by taking away the process of composing an original piece of work and struggling through the writing process, the student just will not improve or get anything out of the essay. It takes away the complexity of writing an essay, but removes the useful, fundamental parts away from the task. This leads to a false presentation of literacy - which can be especially dangerous for job applications and professions that require creativity.

The future ahead

The phenomena of technology oversimplifying life has been explored in various movies and literature regarding dystopic or utopic futures. In the popular animated film “Wal-e,” technology simplifies life to the point where humans are large balloons that are more like pets to technology. With their every need provided for them, these humans are pampered beyond belief. There is no art or science or progress - it’s just technology herding humans as if humans herding cows.

Additionally, people can struggle to do things on their own. With video games and social media, youth are able to grow up without having the need to learn how to do important things in the adult world. For example, while teens can have a strong online presence and dominate in social media, face-to-face communication becomes a point of concern. This leads to a reliance on technology - but if the technology becomes obsolete or is inaccessible due to an electricity shortage or limitage of internet, then it can become a matter of life or death to know certain tasks that are simplified by technology. For example, let’s consider a person that travels on an autonomous car, but then due to some error or natural disaster, they have to manually drive the car. This can be a serious challenge if the passenger does not posess these skills.

Life is hard. Technology makes it easier, and that’s mostly a good thing. But there are some tasks and processes where the complexity and difficultly is the point. In many circumstances, I believe that technology is especially useful for learning something new or complex. However, I feel that it is still important to then later understand the complexities and details of the technology and how the technology simplifies the task. In other cases, diving right in the deep end and trying to complete a task without an oversimplification from technology can teach very useful personal traits like patience, perserverance, and learning to navigate a difficult or foreign situation.

Let’s not fail to remember that simplification raises the expectations and standards of life. While technology can simplify life, it only simplifies life to those who can afford or can use the technology. This can serve to severely seperate populations on the basis of age, ability, and socio-economic status. While the internet and phones simplify communication greatly, it becomes just that much harder for a person to thrive in the world without these devices. A person without a computer or phone does not have the same simplicity in sending emails or searching for jobs, which further perpetuates a cycle of poverty and inaccesibility.

Simplifying life should not be a replacement for understanding the complex parts or an excuse for avoiding any sort of heavy lifting. I think it’s important to have both simple and complex options and to consider the importance of learning how to complete a task without simplification.

Is it necessary to learn the complex task?
How complex is the task?
Is the complexity a point of pride or achievement?
Is the complexity a way to improve ones self or develop positive traits?

This is not an all-inclusive list of questions to consider when looking at a new technology, but it is a start in analyzing the impact that technology has on doing everyday tasks in life. Hopefully, humanity will avoid a fate as depicted in Wall-e, but not give up technology that is useful. Simplification is not necessarily a bad thing as some may see, but it can abstract away important skills or features of life.