OLIVIA WRITES: Recently, I watched a show with my family in which a building was controlled completely by computers and tech. When a virus infected it, the building’s systems went crazy; the doors locked, the power generators caught on fire, and if it weren’t for the team of geniuses in the building who saved them all, everyone would have been killed.
This might sound crazy, but this is what our generation is becoming like. People want everything controlled by technology. In another ten or twenty years, we will likely have cars that drive themselves. Maybe I’m over-reacting, but the idea of people relying solely on man made technology scares me.
How should we react to our technologically advancing generation?
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I think all the technological advances people have made are a good thing. But just like any good thing, we can abuse it. And that is what people have done. I feel like when technology begins monopolizing a majority of our time and becomes a priority above other obviously more important things, then it is a problem. I also don’t really like the idea of things being completely controlled by technology because all that does is take away jobs from human beings who could (and should!) be doing the work themselves. So here’s my conclusions: technology is great until it’s prioritized above other things, monopolizes our time, and is an idol in our lives. My idea of the place fore technology in our lives is this: Technology should be there to assist the human and perhaps make things “easier” for us (though that isn’t necessary as we all know), but I don’t think it should replace the human….What i mean is, for example, a cash register is great! You still need a cashier, the cash register just eliminates a lot of time it takes to calculate # and write receipts. BUT it doesn’t replace the human. Self-check isles however, replace the human because no cashier is needed…I’m not saying self-check isles are a sin or that we should boycott them or anything! They are super creative and probably have a place…I’m just using them as an example to explain what I’m saying about not replacing the human… =) Hope this helps!
Like Megan said, there are certainly a great deal of technological advances that are very useful and save lives. The technology for treating illnesses like cancer, for instance, is amazing. I’m extrodinarally gratful for that technology, as well as technology like cars and computers that make life much easier in many aspects.
But, like anything, it can be used or abused. I think that there is a point where it controls our life too much, because God made us to work(Gen. 2) and be responsible for the earth. I do not believe that technology is bad, because God wouldn’t have given us the abilities to invent and create new things if it was. I think that we should be discerning about what is controlling our lives and what isn’t. Use technology prudently, but remember where we came from and don’t loose the skills that we have right now.
We’re made to make things. In Genesis God gives us our purpose to “Be fruitful and multiply” ,most of the time that’s understood as “go get married and have kids”, but I think it’s a command to build cultures, and write good books, and make art, and invent things. When we work we show our God-image and he is glorified. Now that image of God is corrupted by sin, so none of the things we make will ever be perfect. However, I don’t think it’s anything to be scared of. We can trust God with everything. He knows where He’s going with it all. (Spoiler) He wins in the end.
I honestly don’t think there is a biblical answer for this. Technology that controls everything isn’t necessarily bad (no doubt it can be very good). I would say what technology you use probably comes down to personal preferences and common sense. (For example, things like calculators and GPS can make life easier, but it can be useful for us to have the skills just in case they’re not available.)
It doesn’t matter too much, and don’t forget to take one step at a time. Over-controlling computers could kill everyone, but so could terrorists. As Christians, it doesn’t matter if we die because God always works out His will. 😉
A verse that I thought would be fitting to mention is 2 Timothy 1:7
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
Yeah, things change in technology, and it can be kinda scary. But God never changes! And He can give us a spirit of power and a sound mind instead of fear. I hope that encourages you 🙂
So true, and well said!
I think that advancing technology can be a great thing, but it all depends on the way you use it. It can be great, and it can be terrible just as easily. Technology can be used in ways to glorify God in many ways, but if you abuse it then it isn’t helping anyone. I don’t think that technology is necessarily evil, but it can be used to promote evil. It can also be overused the point where you get addicted to it and it’s practically controlling you. I think we all have a choice as to whether we let it control our lives or to let it benefit our lives. We all have a choice to how far we let ourselves go on technology, you can choose to limit it to a point where you know what you’re doing is glorifying God, or you can choose to go to another level to where you’re doing or seeing things that don’t glorifying God. Personally, my view is that it’s all about the choices you make. We aren’t responsible for other people’s actions, they are. But we are responsible for our own actions and the choices that we make. So my advice is that you would make sure everything you do that has to do with technology glorifies God. And that it’s helping you and not hurting you. Hope this helps you out!
Thanks for your opinions and suggestions guys!
Haylie- Great verse! I’ve never heard it before. I’ll have to write it down 😉
I think Haylie nailed it!
I’m thankful God brought it to my mind, so that it could encourage you 🙂 Blessings!
The increase of technology makes me nervous as well. Advance in technology is part of the end times, so it probably won’t get too far before King Jesus rules the world. 🙂
Something I have thought about a lot recently…
Mainly because of the tech implants and stuff like that, like at one point when on facebook it said in multiple articles; “in 2020 we will all have security ID chip implants in our arms!” I don’t think we should alter our bodies for any reasons other than health problems.
The improvements in technology have been a good thing, but we should be able to have self-control on how we use technology. But there are a lot of people who abuse technology like what some of you have said in the comments. Computers, cell-phones, cars, GPS, Internet, and many more are useful items today. You know technology is been used to help people invent things for people in need. I have seen a video where a blind women used a special pair of glasses and she saw her baby for the first time. We shouldn’t be afraid since this was predicted in the Bible how the end will come.
I actually had the same thought recently. I personally get quite annoyed by how our world is infatuated with technology and media and I do believe it’s changing us. But on a different note, technology has helped us tremendously. At our church our pastors wife said “technology can either be a tool or a tyrant”. So the fact is we can use it to read good articles, listen to sermons, get further information on good topics, communicate with friends but it can also have negative effects. Of course it’s addicting and is a huge waste of time, and can lead to areas of sin. I think although we can’t stop the government and others from monitoring the usage of technology we can monitor ourselves. Because I feel like if the more and more we inhale technology, the harder it is to sit still in the presence of God and grow in closer communication with him while our phones blow up 24/7 with new fads,texts,news etc. it’s scary to think of a world completely using technology in every way, with how things are going it seems very possible. But like I read farther down on the discussion we do not need to fear, because no matter what happens here this isnt our home. We don’t belong here, so we don’t need to worry. The joy of heaven pulls us through! I hope this helped.
Thanks 🙂
The idea of tech running everything does concern me. However, I believe that God has gifted our world with great minds. Some of these minds are those who have advanced and introduced technology to so many different areas of life. Though we may feel concerned and/or frightened by the way things look like they are heading… I believe we must simply trust in God. All things are in his hands. Though we can try to keep tech from ruling our lives… in the end, how tech rules the world is in his hands. We can control our own small vicinity. However, it ultimately is all in God’s control.
I would try to focus more on leaning on God’s arm and focusing on the spiritual relationship you have with him.
That is what I am trying to do.
Join me!
Thank you! I hadn’t looked at this in a few days or else I would have replied already. You are right, it’s all in God’s hands and instead of focusing on what we can’t do anything about, we should focus on what we CAN do.
Technology doing the work that humans do scares me. If you look it up there are a lot of people trying to create robots that are controlled with thought or have thoughts of their own. But I believe that people know what they are doing and know the risks.
It’s not the robots becoming like humans that scare me as much as people wanting to alter humans to make people like robots.
Can I ask why it scares you? What is your basis for this fear?
I would challenge you to define the word “technology”. John Dyer in his book, From the Garden to the City, notes that we tend to view as technology anything created since we were born. Do you, for example, view your washer and dryer as technology or are they just a part of life? To go even further back, do you view wheelbarrows as technology? Those didn’t exist in Europe until the early 1000s A.D. and at all on the globe until the second century A.D. when they originated in China. My point is, that in our definition of technology, we tend to be rather inconsistent. Referring back to John Dyer’s book again, we tend to view as technology anything that was created after we were born, anything created in our teens and twenties as cool and fun, and anything created after we are thirty as the end of society.
What is my point? We as humans have always been relying on technology, that technology has simply changed over the years. For example, today, one doomsday scenario is the possibility of an EMP blast in the upper atmosphere. That would fry every computer across up to a third of the globe and immediately shut down communications, every car made since the 1980s, the electric grid, food supply, etc. Without our technology, we would experience mass starvation not to mention severe vulnerability to foreign and domestic attack. We can’t survive without it our computers.
What we need to keep in mind for perspective, however, is that it has always been the case that we as humans would die apart from our technology. What that technology is just a matter of the century in which you live. How many villages starved because a wildfire or foreign army consumed their fields? Fields are a technology, naturally, food bearing plants are not grown in large cultivated fields but in patches here and there. Had the village remained nomadic and foraged for their food, they never would have starved because they never would have had fields to lose.
Why do we use technology though? Because it increases our ability as humans. In effect, it fights against the curse as it reduces the difficulty with which we must work the ground to get food not to mention the benefits regarding disease. Villages form around large food supplies, as technology increases, human civilization flourishes too and we are able to live in far greater number. By creating “dangerous man-made” tools, we are able to relinquish portions of our work to objects and move on to bigger and better enterprises.
So then, in regard to technology, I would not fear that we are becoming too dependent on technology because our livelihood has always been inextricably linked to our technology. The difference today, however, is that our technology is advancing far more rapidly and consequently we are having to deal with changes far more rapidly than any previous civilization. For example, it used to be, that human culture had multiple hundreds of years to get used to one advance, before another presented itself. For example, there were about 400 years between the wheelbarrow and the printing press in Europe. Also, interesting factoid, people originally discouraged reading many books as they became readily available for the first time in history because they thought it would make your mind lazy. Now, that books have been around for a while, it is considered the sign of a superior intellect that one reads many books.
In conclusion then, it is human nature to fear the new and untested. However, it is unnecessary to fall to this fear in light of the fact that we have always depended on technology and feared the new until it became an accepted way of life; gradually becoming so accepted that we no longer even realize it wasn’t always there.
Quick note on computers, by the way, speaking as a computer engineering student, it defies the laws of information science for computers to take over the world or “have thoughts of their own.” The created will not and can never have mastery over the creator. They can never surpass us because they can never get anymore than what we give them and we cannot give them that which we don’t have. Additionally, computers are completely incapable of originality. They cannot create. They are only capable of performing carefully specified tasks that we give them or messing those tasks up. Their strength lies not in the fact that they can do amazing things, as one of my computer engineering professors says, but in the fact that “computers can do simple things amazingly fast.” Case in point, two days ago, I had to specify piece by piece to my program just how to tell me where the ships were on an electronic battleship board. Once that was completed, it only took the program fifteen minutes to play 1,000,000 battleship games and tell me what percentage of the time the computer ship layout generator put a ship in each given spot on the standard 10 by 10 battleship grid. With that information, I was able to use Excel to create a heat map showing the likelihood of finding a ship in different areas by color. These are all incredibly simple tasks, just play one million games of battleship, every time you find a ship record the position, total up the number of times there was a ship in each spot in all 1 million games, divide that number by 1,000,000 and output that to a text file so I can see where to program my AI to shoot first. To quote my professor again “Computers don’t do amazing things, they do simple things amazingly fast.” As far as your specific example goes, I wouldn’t take too much from a movie about computers. Viruses and hackers are practically unlimited in their abilities on screen while reality is in fact far more complicated and abilities far more limited. And, if you do design a security system that can lock you inside, then I would be quicker to blame the engineer who designed the system for having poor foresight than to blame technology as the culprit.
I must say, I didn’t read all that – but I do love your sentence, “The created will not and can never have mastery over the creator.” It seems that even computers can teach us fundamental truths about life. 🙂 Aside from the spiritual parallel, however, I think you made a good practical point.