How many of us remember MySpace? How many of us remember having to wait till we got home to get on it or using a proxy to get on it at school? (Don’t lie, you know you did). This and sites like Club Penguin were almost our only connections to technology as kids. Well, some of us had phones, but the only games they had were like Bubble Breaker. Nowadays, 5-year-olds have iPhones and toddlers know how to navigate tablets. We have AI voices that can tell us anything and even do things for us. When did technology take over? How did we let this happen? While it’s not quite at the level of the movie "I,Robot," soon technology may become smarter than us…
When smartphones first came out, the world almost lost it’s mind. People couldn’t believe that a phone could do so much, especially adults who remembered the brick phones of their time. These new phones were small and they were touchscreens as well. Before long there were different versions from various companies but. There was one that stood out from the rest. This was the iPhone. Not only did the phone look like the best, but it had premium software that users knew was similar to that of a Macintosh computer. But as the commercial world we live in goes, there was competition. This came from Android phones, which were introduced to have the instantly recognizable “Droooiiid” voice when turned on. (Do any of them still do that?) And ever since the hashtags #TeamiPhone and #TeamAndroid can be seen floating around social media…
Nowadays it seems like we rely on technology for everything. We rely on it to book hotels for us, tell us information, monitor the temperature of our house and other tasks. While it is convenient to have these things, we still have to teach the children of today how things were before this technology existed. Otherwise, they won't know how fortunate they really are. Some even take it for granted, sadly. If stuck on a problem for homework, their parent may offer their help and they'll say, “No, I’ll just use the so and so app.” They learn to get instant answers instead of actually learning how to actually solve the problem itself. As adults, we even rely on technology to keep track of schedules and meetings and such. But if something goes wrong with our accounts and everything is lost, then we are lost. Since everything is just on the cloud, we rely on it being there always. The way to combat this I believe is to have schedules in our phones or other devices and on an actual physical calendar. That way, we are still safe no matter what happens.
Technology is not a bad thing. However, as we all know, too much of a good thing can be bad for us. We must learn to use technology but not to fully rely on it. Because one day it could all go away…