Has technology made the earth a better place?

I would say "no"

Personally, I think technology has seperated people more than ever..

what do you think?

 

Short answer-
Yes and No.

Technology has def. made a lot of things much better for a lot of people. If you think about what all technology includes, that is obvious.

But yes, technology has made people more secluded in many ways and also unable to appreciate the here and now... know their neighbors...participate in their communities, etc.

 

No.

It has made things convenient for humans. It has not benefitted the earth or any other species but humans .

 

Haha... Yea, I read the question wrong. No, technology has not made the Earth a better place actually.


For the pos I was thinking of technology extended human life by things like... well, medical equipment like pace makers and x-ray machines and sanitation facilities and on and on... but I can't say those things have benefited the earth, just humanity.

 

I really don't. I think people lived shorter but happier and more fulfilling lives before technology took over. And that's just the technology the average person has access to.

 

For humans? Hard to say without a time machine. We'll never know if people were happier or not in the past, before written records or anything like that.

For the earth and the rest of the species on it? No.

 

No black/white answer possible.

Technology has made the earth a better place for humans (obviously) in some ways, but it has disadvantages as well. It can be argued it also made it a better place for domestic dogs

 

And I really hate to sound cliché but technology can really have the impact-positive or negative on any individual human life that you allow it to. If you still live normal life.. you know, the kind of life before the internet, where people picked up the phone to call each other and talked to people who lived near them... but also use the internet sometimes (not too often) to get to know other people you wouldn't have talked to before as well as to keep in touch with friends and family who live far away and who you wouldn't speak to as often...
And to learn about new things (that you can apply to your regular, non-technological life)....
Then you can actually make technology have a positive impact for yourself.
It's really all how you use it.

 

technology itself does nothing without the priorities of the culture of the people making and using it determining the direction in which it evolves and the manor in which it is used.

humans with their heads up their little green paper asses are certainly using technologies in ways that are destroying the planet's ability to support the continued existence of our own species.

the fault though, does not lie with creative innovation of technology, but with priorities and the motivations they statistically create.

technology 100% compatable with nature is wile satisfying every gratifying usefulness of it, is perfectly capable of being engineered. but instead, the incentives created by the priorities people in the dominant culture are living by, lead almost directly in a very nearly opposite direction.

technology is a very broad brush the incompases everything from a monkey using a stick to dig an ant out of an ant-hill, to robotic rovers on distant plants.

burning coal to make steam would have been fine for a long time, if population never increased beyond what it was in 1830.

technology doesn't do things to people. people using technology without thinking about the kind of incentives their priorities create, do things to people and their world, often more harmful then not.

but what are you going to stop using? the automobile? no problem with that. television? that too. everything electrical including your computer you wrote that and i'm reading it because of? well i guess i won't be hearing much from you.

is it the fault of electricity that people use coal and uranium to generate it? when they could be using sun, wind, and falling water, among others?

hardly. but it is largely the fault of trying to make everything begin and end with little green pieces of paper.

 

Good point AT, technology continues to be in development and is subject to the motives of its creators. Although it could go both ways I can see it shift to an even more positive change. The more we know about the impact the more sensible (and positive) the motive might change for the better

 

Yep. In the grand scheme of things it could go either way... but in the meantime, it can go anyway.

You know, about technology in general I just heard a few days ago that they are soon going to be able to download memories into the brains of patients effected by Alzheimer's or stroke victims. It's hard to say what all new things-both positive and negative the future will hold...and things do seem to be moving much faster recently.

 

We would all dislike living without any technology, that's for sure. But we could also all do without some for sure too.
The people living centuries ago might have been happy without modern technology because they didn't know what they were missing anyway. For us though... living without any at all would most likely make us conclude that it made the world a better place indeed (for us at least)!

 

made the earth a better place. not even. made the human experience of living on it better, that's a very mixed bag. but again, it isn't the technology, its us, and what we've chosen to do with it, and even the ways in which it has evolved resulting from the incentives our priorities have created for the process by which it does so.

it is precisely this ambiguity of thinking, that confuses "the earth" with OUR EXPERIENCING OF IT, that has caused and allowed so much of it to have become harmful.

get over it humans: the dust between the stars does not worship the ass of your species.

 

Technology is around 300 years old. Steam Engine is generally taken as a starting point.

In these 300 years, world population has grown 7 fold



For the same period, carbon footprint has grown 10 fold.



So, technology has not made earth a better place.
But it has helped in survival of human race, nothing more.That's my view.

Source-

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped....svg/235px-World-Population-1800-2100.svg.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ons.svg/320px-Global_Carbon_Emissions.svg.png

 

In some ways yes, and in others, no....

 

wrong. technolgy is as old as flint knives and wearing bear skins to keep warm.

the use of combustion to power mechanical kennetics is NOT the deffinitian of "technology".

it is of course, combustion powered mechanics, that were the precursor to micro-mechanics. i'll give you that.

(and also at the root of the harm, that combined with population excess, are responsible for today's distopian result)

 

That's good. I was expecting this discussion.

"What is Technology" needs to be defined first.

 

Medical advances, knowledge at our fingertips, space travel, seem to have helped. Recipients of drone strikes and other "advances" in technological warfare have made it a worse and more terrifying place.

 

Technology simply means technology in general. What you were talking about can be called industrialisation or modern technology.

 

There is no definitive answer to this question. It has improved our lives but it also complicates life.