The Benefits and Drawbacks of Technology

Throughout time man’s technology has advanced—from tools of stone to machine guns, microwave oven, cell phone, digital camera and spacecraft. Rarely has the history seen technology backslide. The ever fierce market competition impels high-tech companies to innovate and update their technology, otherwise they will be lagged behind and suffer a loss. With the burgeoning of new technologies came negative effects—environmental contamination for instance, which bring the benefits of modern technology into question. While sometimes people do profit from avoiding the use of modern technology, on balance, the benefit of using modern technology outweighs the cost.
 
As an excellent example of a great man who has taken advantage from modern technology is Steven Hawking. Without the speech generating device removing the obstacles for him, Steven Hawking--who is almost entirely paralyzed--could not have communicated his ideas with us, let alone the production of the astounding and astonishing work of Physics—the History of Time. Imagine if he is not so lucky to be born into this modern world, then we would not have an answer to the ultimate questions of mankind and the universe. Great people as such widely populate the realms of science, archeology, architecture and so on.
 
The benefit of technology extends much farther than to individual scientists such as Steven Hawking. As a matter of fact, technological innovations have brought about profound changes to the life of the world’s population in various areas. Consider, for instance, the education arena. The Internet has contributed significantly to education, as students can search for categorized research papers without going to the library. Or consider the field of agriculture. Thanks to DNA for agriculture, billions of people in famine have survived. Or let us examine the latest breakthrough in medicine and medical technology. Few would disagree that humanity is the beneficiary of numerous twentieth-century innovations...