Alone Together pg 1-52

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle is an old view point on the way that technology is taking over our lives. But she is right. Technology can take advantage of basic human functions. They can be our personal slaves, fulfilling our wishes and needs, and all the while doing it from the palm of your hand. People depend on inanimate objects to get jobs done. Things like hammers and saws are necessary for building anything. But what if that hammer had an auto-hit function and when you activated it, it would never ever hit your fingers holding the nail? It would make the job infinitely easier, and sooner or later, the skill to be able to hammer a nail without smashing a finger or two would be lost to the accessibility of the auto-hit function. It is the same thing with smart phones and smart devices. The smarter a computer gets, the easier it is for us to depend on it. It knows what we want, which is evident in the personal assistant partitions within most phones these days. You ask it a question and almost instantaneously you get the response you want, eliminating the need for you to open up the internet application and manually type in what you want to know. Pretty soon, it may be entirely possible for us to get rid of the virtual keyboards within these phones and merely be able to talk to them, as if they were a real live personal assistant. It is this improving ease of function that poses a threat to our society as we know it. In 20 years, if things continue the way they are now, many of the aspects of humanity could be lost. Who knows, maybe we'll eventually end up with these computers implanted in little neurochips in the sides of our brains, eliminating the need to use our hands to operate them? It's all one science fiction story after the next, but the thing about science fiction is that it should stay as fiction, because the closer we get to fiction, the further we get from reality.