Speech- Braeden Bowen

To Infinity and Beyond: How Mod­ern Technology Impacts Human Society

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey. James Cameron's Terminator. The Wachowski's Matrix. Since the dawn of modern computational technology in the 1940's, humans have fantasized about the limits to which it can innovate. Of course, all of those examples depict our concerns and fears about technology. In truth, humanity has used what it has created in the last 70 years to revolutionize communication, transform work, and advance medical care to benefit people all over the world.

Take out your phones and turn them on. Send a quick text to someone in this room. While you’re doing that, think about the fact that you just tapped on a metal box and communicated with someone. I mean, you can hold that box up to your head and immediately speak to anyone on the planet. Interestingly, and this may come as a surprise, humans have not always been able to do this. Only with the rise of mobile phones (and more recently, smartphones), have humans been able to communicate with such ease.

Einstein once said that he feared the day technology would surpass human interaction, as he believed it would create a generation of idiots. What Einstein could not have predicted was that technology has not created an absence of interaction; it has created new interaction. Instead of sitting down in a room sipping tea and chatting, we text. We Tweet. We Snapchat. The way teens and young adults of the technological generation most often correspond is not through face-to-face interaction, but via electronic communication. There is no lack of interaction in this form of communication; there is, however, different interaction. In researching for this speech, I found that most sources discredit electronic communication. An article by the University of Wisconsin argued that electronic communication shortens face-to-face conversation (Walker); a 2008 Pew Research Center article commentary corroborated. These sources, though, based their interpretation of communication on outdated standards. The truth is that with increasing technology, the way we communicate does change.

Have look around this classroom. You might have difficulty looking somewhere and not seeing a piece of technology that didn’t exist 20 years ago. Even as recently as the 90's, businessmen in cramped cubicles did their work with boxy, primitive machines displaying only a black screen and white text. Today, some devices are 13 millimeters thin and have twice the processing power of those in the mid- 90’s. The rise of laptops, tablets, and other portable computers has given way to new kinds of work that is much different than before. So too, programs like Microsoft’s Word and Excel have dramatically increased productivity and ease-of-access that technology provides. With newfound interconnectedness, many companies now focus not on just one region, state, or country, but the entire world. Technology makes trade partnerships, international communication, record-keeping, and, of course, quarterly report-writing, more efficient and effective than at other times.

Like the opposition to drastic changes in communication, saying “work isn’t what isn’t what it used to be because everyone isn’t working in fields or in a factory” is simply basing the definition of labor on past standards. The truth is, with a modern, global economy we do need cubicle jobs with compact, mobile devices to accomplish increasingly complex tasks that simply didn’t exist prior to the invention of the first computers.

Unlike work and communication, medical technology isn’t always in the public eye. Major developments and breakthroughs are not widely debated like the new iPhone (now with extra gizmos) is. However, changes in medical technology save hundreds of thousands of lives yearly. Since the late 19^th Century, new medical technologies have increased 100 fold, including items like the X-Ray and pacemaker and processes such as the lobotomy and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We can now fit cameras inside the stomach and intestines, perform heart surgery with a few pinpricks of a machine, and monitor the vital signs of a patient with any number of nodes and sensors; what’s more, online records centralize all of a patient’s data so that any doctor he sees can learn about his medical history.

In the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2015 Global Survey on Heath Technology Assessment by National Authorities, it was determined that developing countries had growing access to advanced medical technologies, treatments, and vaccines, preventing more than two million deaths this year alone. (9-29). In an interview with online magazine The Verge, technological pioneer Bill Gates supported the WHO, dedicating the support of his foundation in developing and distributing new vaccines and surgical technologies for the better of all mankind. Despite its lack of glamourous appearance, medical technology is, perhaps more than communication or work tech, altering the outcome of both first and third-world countries.

To conclude, each year, we make more and more new parts and devices, meaning that today is the most advanced the human race has ever been. Since the first computer was designed, technology has increased like a parabola. Slowly at first, and then all of a sudden, we’ve got smartphones and tablets with touchscreens and near constant connection to the internet, all created within a ten-year period. By means of this increasingly advanced technology and its prevalence in society, the human race has and will continue to revolutionize its communication, all but overhaul the way it accomplishes daily tasks, and has modernize medical care, saving millions of lives. So despite the fears of Einstein and Kubrick, human innovation has continued to change society for the better, and I for one am excited to see what it has in store.