Technology

[PopeOxycontinI]

Apart from advances in alternative energy or healthcare, is there still room for technology
to enhance quality of life? There is a thread down below on 3D printing, and I just don't buy it.
The PC, the internet, and now the smart phone. They have brought us outsourcing, automation,
and irritating-ass 24/7 leashing to the office for those fortunate enough to still have jobs.
Facebook is positively insipid, if you want to get in touch me, what's wrong with e-mailing or
calling? Nothing from the past 5 years or so really does any good. Why should I believe that 3D
printing or any similar advances will do anything other than increase the unemployment rate,
or at least become an irritating social nuisance like texting and facebook?

[Life Long Dem]

1. When you think global and technology

then the PC, the internet, and the smart phone didn't wipe out jobs - they were just offshored. I don't think we'll stop advances in technology.

3-D printing is just another product. Similar to play-doh. You buy the material delivered to you or at the store, and you mold it or print it out.

[ZOB]

2. You're confusing tech advances with what people DO with those advances

Technological advances are neither "good" nor "bad" in a moral sense. They're new tech. They can be used by people in a variety of ways.

They provide us with new options. Yes, they're frequently used in ways that some (maybe most) view as ultimately negative, but that just an issue of use. Better tools are better tools, and if the right person picks them up, that person can do some pretty incredible things.

[GobBluth]

3. As a late deafened woman, Technology has only ENHANCED

my way of life. Many more jobs have opened up to me. Many more social interactions have opened up to me. I get what you are saying, but for me I pray every night that technology increases even faster. I won't even try to speak for other "disabled" people, but I'm am going to assume that it is the same for them also.

[napoleon_in_rags]

4. What's been striking me lately is the new forms of mental illness.

Subtle, but you see them effecting people. What happened is we went from a direct access experience of life, to an encoded one. We don't express our emotions to friends, we encode them - into text, emoticons, etc. And we decode their messages to us. Text words, and symbols especially those written quickly like text messages, are prone to misinterpretation: 90% of face to face communication is non-verbal, so 90% of it is missing. This results in a part of the brain that decodes from limited information being strengthened to the point of pathology, where people interpret messages from sources that weren't intended, and it has the bizarre effect of synchronizing people's behavior in weird ways, as the brain learns that just about anything can be a code.

But really technology itself is a force of nature, nothing can be done about it except to attempt to direct it. A lot of the trends in IT recently have been toward centralization, which has the dual aspect of bringing people into collaboration, while centralizing control. 3D printing as a valid manufacturing tech bucks this trend, but this is precisely why I expect to see it suppressed more than embraced. The arguments against it are already emerging naturally:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/most-dangerous-people/?pid=1696

But what matters is the market, that's why its a force of nature. We could all avoid it, but if its the turn key to a new age of industrial production, the US will be left in the dust by those who don't, because at the end of the day, in every flag waving town in America, there is a Wal-Mart, filled with Chinese goods that those flag waving people buy, because its the cheapest. If stamp says "made in 01" instead of China, than people will buy that just as quickly when the money is short. We have very little control over the matter.

[Posteritatis]

5. "I don't like this new stuff, therefore it's objectively bad." (nt)

[DetlefK]

6. Medicine and health define quality of life, too.

* better dental technology
* laser-surgery for those who need glasses
* bionic eyes for the blind (results may vary, but it's better than being blind, see here for example: http://2-sight.eu/en/product-en)
* bionic hand with sense of touch (developed in Switzerland, prototype will be tested later this year with italian patient)
* exoskeleton to give paraplegics the ability to walk (see here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017107826)

and the list goes on

[randome]

7. And computer modeling and data processing make all that possible, too.