The Luddites are a group of people who believe that technology has had a destructive effect on society. People across the world may have a different opinion about whether technology has had a positive or negative effect on society. But I think everyone’s answer would come out the same: that technology has had more positive effects than negative effects. There are many reasons backing up this statement such as improvements in medicine, the creation of the motorized vehicle, ways for students to do their work, and farming. Although these are just a couple advantages, there are many more.
People might first off think that technology has had a bad effect on society. There are good reasons to think this. Back before the revolutions of science and agriculture, time was not a main concern. People did their day-to-day things. They went to work, came home, ate dinner, and went to bed. There were very few things that happened in between those events. They did not have to worry about the time and whether they were going to be late for something. They did not worry about getting something done because there would not be enough daylight.
Since we have had this huge increase in technology, time has become a huge factor. Many people will say, “there should be more than 24 hours in a day”, or something to that degree. Our world now moves so much faster. Clocks are now a bigger concern because we need to know what time it is in order to get this done or that done. Pollution would be another good argument for why technology is a negative impact on society. There never used to be concerns for the o-zone layer. We did not have millions of people driving around in their cars and big factories producing lots of bad chemicals for the air.
Today, we have to wonder if our earth will go another hundred years because of the pollution that we now produce as an effect of technology. One the other hand, technology has done great things for us today. What I am doing right now could not be done fifty years ago. If we wanted to write anything, it had to be in hand writing. Now we have these fancy computers, who do all the work for us. But they do more than just write for us. They connect us with people all across the world. They let us travel with out cars, which is one of the biggest advances in technology.
Before the invention of the car, people had to travel place to place by horse, horse and buggy, or foot. Now, not only can we travel in our cars, trucks, or whatever we drive, we can scope the world on the internet. Vehicles let us drive from place to place while we just sit in the car steer, give the gas, and break. Technology has allowed us to make the freeways that you and I drive on everyday. Although there are barrels, slow drivers, and exits we have to dodge, motorized vehicles allow us to travel anywhere faster than we could in the past. Farming has change drastically.
Before the agriculture revolution, men had to plow the fields using donkeys and walking many miles a day. Now we have tractors and combines that do the work for us. Tractors and combines allow farmers to spend less time in the fields because they can ride in the cab and get the work done in less time. Farmers can work on more fields, which means they can cultivate more fields, create more crops, and collect more money for their family. Medical advances are one of the biggest advances in technology. Twenty years ago, a man that had a liver problem might not have lived because hospitals did not know how to treat his disease.
Since the beginning of medical treatments, every year there is a new treatment or they have discovered an antidote for a disease or virus. I bet that in the next twenty years there will be a cure for AIDS. It is only a matter of time. They have found a cure for most of the past diseases and viruses, so this is just the next big discovery. The bottom line is that we do not even realize how much of an impact technology has on our lives. We do things that people twenty, forty, or one hundred years ago would not even dream of doing, and we do not even know it.
We take for granted everything we do. Next time you are with your grandmother, or someone of a higher generation, ask them how it was when he or she was a teenager. Even you can tell that things have change dramatically. If we did not have these advances our world would not grow. We would still be wearing our two outfits of clothes five days a week, and our one good outfit on Sunday. Technology is the food that feeds our world and us and makes us grow, which is why technology has had greater advantages than disadvantages.
