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Are We Too Dependent on Our Technology?

I was just thinking how dependent we are on our modern gadgets. Life almost stops when certain ones stop working, so is it an improvement when we use cable telephones and the cable goes out and we can’t make a call? In the old days of land lines, I never remember our telephone ever going out even once. You would think something could be done to prevent this, it was done in the old days of copper wire and yet with all our new technology we can’t keep the phone going 100 percent of the time. The same is true for cell phones. If the signal goes down or you get out of range of a tower, the phone goes down. When we go somewhere we can’t help but notice the amount of people using cell phones. You see them everywhere. What I can’t understand and maybe its because I am of the older generation, is people using cell phones as computers while crossing the street or even walking instead of paying attention to where they are going. It seems to me these people need to be reeducated in the use of the cell phone. One has to wonder what these people do when their cell phones go down?

I can’t help but think at some point we are going to have roads full of self-driving cars. We are all going to get used to them and after a while take them for granted much as we do with all new consumer technologies. Some day something might happen and the internet connection to your car might go down while you are traveling at 80 miles per hour on some super-road while you are sitting in the back seat pleasantly reading your paper. What effect will this have on the trip? You might think you would be totally safe and then find out this was never taken into account and this somehow affects your automobile causing you to get into some sort of accident. Remember how these companies treat your data. I bet before the breaches everyone thought their data was safe and never worried about anything happening to it. We learned our lesson with this didn’t we?

We are just beginning to see the entire world becoming connected to the internet. I am not just talking about individuals who have their computers and televisions and maybe their phones connected. I am talking about the connection of every device in your home. What a temptation for hackers this is going to be. We will eventually be living in a smart home. Some homes may be smarter than others depending on the amount of money you have to spend on them, but someday all homes will be smart. Your refrigerator will order food on its own and set its one temperatures for the box and freezer. You can already buy a thermostat which can be controlled by an app on your phone. Lights are able to be controlled along with outlets. I have even seen smart toilets. What will happen when your toilet decides to do something you don’t like, because of some glitch in the software or gives you a wrong diagnosis? Yes, the toilet can now examine your waste for at least some diseases.

The military also depends on their new gadgets. At one time one of the biggest advances in technology was when wrist watches were introduced into the war. The British decided to issue wrist watches to the soldiers so they could coordinate attacks. This was a big deal. Today there are satellites which are used for communication, spying and have many other uses. One has to wonder what would happen if they were rendered inoperative. Would we be left without technology? The problem with this is we probably don’t have any of the old stuff anymore. This is what happened in the sequel to Independence Day. All satellites were destroyed and there just happened to be an old radar set on the base which was being shipped to a museum and it had to be pressed back into service. Sure, this was only a movie, but what if this kind of thing happened in real life, would the military be ready for it?

Sometimes all this technology can easily be defeated. In the case of military technology Iran demonstrated how easily they were able to do this. They protected their ships from infrared heat seeking missiles by pulling rafts behind their ships and these rafts contained fires which defeated the missiles. Another thing they did was fly up to one of our drones and capture it in mid-flight and this allowed them to examine our technology. The people who designed these things never thought of these simple ways to defeat our technology. Maybe when we design things we should also have people there who try and think of every way this technology could be defeated and provide an answer to the problem.

One of the big problems today is rogue nations with nukes, but this fear is overlooking the fact any nation can create a bomb which will fry all our electronics. Knocking out the electrical grid and our electronics could be even more devastating than some nukes if the bomb or missile has a big enough range or enough of these bombs or warheads are dropped on us. Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to rely solely on all this connected technology without having a backup program. Would it be wise for us to have alternate technologies which are not dependent on the internet or even on the power grid? I think so, we can never be too careful.

This all leads to the question, are we too reliant on technology or is the problem the new technology hasn’t been completely thought through? I am not talking about the designs of devices, what I am talking about is how to prevent them from failing because of glitches, hacking or just ordinary power or signal loss.

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