Luis Hoyos
05/16/16
ENG 1121- D465
Research Essay
Technology Advances
C.P Snow said “Technology … is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand and stabs you in the back with the other.” Since then it has been almost forty years and technology has advanced drastically since he said that quote. What C.P Snow said about technology being a double edged sword that both helps and hurts us still holds true to this day. Even though technology helps most of us on a daily basis it can also have negative impact as well. The impacts that technology have on us whether they be good or bad become more prevalent the more advanced technology becomes. How does technology help us, hurt us, and which has had a bigger impact on people.
It is no surprise that technology has helped people throughout their day to day lives but there may be somethings you had no idea technology had an impact on. One of these fields is the medical field prosthetic limbs are nothing new in fact they are quite old but with the power of technology scientist are now studying how prosthetic limbs can be controlled naturally though the use of electrodes. The article “On the viability of implantable electrodes for the natural control of artificial limbs: Review and discussion.” This is clearly stated in the abstract which says “This paper describes several implantable electrodes and discusses them as a solution for the natural control of artificial limbs.” This is just one minor example of technology making quality of life much better for people. A much bigger technological advancement in the medical field is the use of noninvasive surgery to help treat sever problems including cancer. In the article “The road to clinical use of high-intensity focused ultrasound for liver cancer: technical and clinical consensus” the authors bring up the fact that technology has helped the advancement of such procedures “a consensus from a panel of experts about technical and clinical requirements for upcoming pilot and pivotal studies in order to accelerate the development and adoption of focused ultrasound for the treatment of primary and secondary liver cancer.” The fact that technology can help treat some of the most sever illnesses shows how powerful and useful it is to our daily lives. But in what other fields does technology help us in.
Another area in which technology has helped is travel without technology we would not be able to travel across the world as fast and as comfortably as we do today. Some travel advances that came from technology are such vehicles as the car, train, airplane, ship, and submarine. All of these forms of transportation came about because of the advancement of technology. But one of them most amazing forms of travel is the spaceship but the technology used to make space travel possible has been used to help people’s daily lives. In the web article “NASA Technologies Benefit Our Lives” this article can be found on the NASA website the in the web article they name off a few technologies made to help space travel but are also useful in our daily life some of the items they listed are LEDs, artificial limbs, improved tires, fire fighter gear. The other way that technology helps travel is in a more direct fashion it allows us to travel across the world in a timely manner compared to previous times where traveling was a hassle and would take a very long time. Technology has not only helped us there are also down falls.
Though many people agree that technology is a great thing there is no denying that bad things came from technology. Since the introduction of technology a new kind of crime has also followed along shortly. This crime I am talking about is cybercrime this consist of hacking, identity theft, and many others according to the bureau of justice statistics “17.6 Million U.S. residents experienced identity theft in 2014” compared to the 2012 statistics this is a one-million increase in identity theft alone. Recently a huge hacking of credit card info occurred where 40 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen from a very trusted company called target. This is a problem because the hackers got into targets point-of-sale to steal this info the worst part of this is that target executives were not aware they were hacked until the government told them so. In the article “Target Execs Had No Idea They Were Hacked Until the Government Told Them” an executive stated that “the company was oblivious that hackers were stealing its customers’ information until the government informed the company last month.” this means that the hackers were able to steal all of this info without being detected in the same article the chief financial officer admitted to having multiple layers of defense and even with all of this protection the hackers did not have trouble stealing the information.
Throughout history there have been wars but none have been as deadly as the ones where man used technology to advance their weapons. One of the most controversial topics about the world wars were whether or not the atomic bombs should have been dropped. The creator of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer said “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” His creation was used to end WWII but the bomb killed hundreds of thousands of people. In both world wars over 75 million people were killed. This amount of devastation was not heard of before on such a large scale before. This power came about because the technology existed to be able to increase the lethality of our weapons this is just one case but there are many more.
In conclusion there are advantages and disadvantages to technology. But which has had a bigger impact on our daily life. The advantages that technology brings is great advantages to our day to day lives but the disadvantages of technology are very sever so is the small benefits that technology created for us worth the huge risk that comes along with. I do believe so I think we need to take the good and the bad of technology together and just hope that the good will out weight the potential bad things that technology can do. Of course it would be great if we could only take the good from technology but sadly this is not possible we have to be able to cope with the problems that technology creates.
Reference page
Ortiz-Catalan Max, BrĂĄnemark Rickard, HĂĄkansson Bo, and Delbeke Jean. “On the Viability of Implantable Electrodes for the Natural Control of Artificial Limbs: Review and Discussion.” BioMedical Engineering OnLine 11.1 (2012): 33. Web.
Aubry, Jean-Francois, Kim Butts Pauly, Chrit Moonen, Gail Ter Haar, Mario Ries, Rares Salomir, Sham Sokka, Kevin Michael Sekins, Yerucham Shapira, Fangwei Ye, Heather Huff-Simonin, Matt Eames, Arik Hananel, Neal Kassell, Alessandro Napoli, Joo Ha Hwang, Feng Wu, Lian Zhang, Andreas Melzer, Young-sun Kim, and Wladyslaw M Gedroyc. “The Road to Clinical Use of High-intensity Focused Ultrasound for Liver Cancer: Technical and Clinical Consensus.” Journal of Therapeutic Ultrasound 1 (2013): 13. Print.
“NASA Technologies Benefit Our Lives.” NASA Technologies Benefit Our Lives. Web. 22 May 2016.
Sasso, Brendan. “Target Execs Had No Idea They Were Hacked Until the Government Told Them.” Nationaljournal.com(2014): Nationaljournal.com, Feb 4, 2014. Web.
