Is technology running our lives?

As I do on most mornings, I lay in my bed with my iPhone locked into portrait view so I can go aimlessly through all my social media apps and maybe even read some light-hearted news without lifting my head.

This Saturday morning, I took a peek at Facebook, The Verge and a few other media outlets so I could gradually wake up to some exciting news about Satya Nadella, the newly appointed Microsoft C.E.O, or to eventually become enraged by one of my friends beating my high score in Flappy Bird (that high score is 54, by the way, which took me way too long to admit).

Incidentally, I found an article about the Flappy Bird creator, who announced that he will be taking down the game within the week. A recent tweet of his reads “I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.” Despite my addiction to the game, I can agree that it’s absorbed too much of my time, albeit to a lesser degree than his, obviously. After this Flappy Bird shock, I took a look at some of the other articles in The Verge about hackers looming around to attack vulnerable Sochi visitors and the recurrent incidence of Bitcoin thefts. It seems that technology, the double-edged sword of today’s society, seems to be ruining the simple life for most of us. 

Our lives are now entirely run by gears and single thing that has managed to slip away from the influence of technology. With all of these technological prosthetics that help us live our life without hesitation, it can sometimes be hard to notice that we, humans, are rapidly evolving. GPS-aided Smart Cars have changed how spontaneous we can be when driving. The movie “Her” describes a man who falls in love with a virtual assistant, like Siri, posing a question of whether humans can legitimately find attraction in artificial intelligence one day. 

This begs another question: Is technological evolution working against our natural, biological evolution as a species? Despite the virtues of technology, it can actually be leading our species to a world undesired. Internal combustion engines are a typical example of this — the pollution from automobiles may be shaving off the lifetime of the world we live in. Take diseases as another example.

Many of our medical issues are being solved with technological advances. Great. But it can also be argued that some of these problems are being caused by technology itself. For example, the mass extraction and production of sugar has caused countless cases of obesity. Televisions, another product of technology, have exacerbated this situation.

As we struggle with technological consequences like drug addiction and even the trivial case of Flappy Bird taking time away from exercise, we have already entered a generation where we succumb to actions that are not the best decisions for our survival. We are slowly adapting to the ideal world we desire, instead of adapting to what our world is now. This is further complicated by our market economy, which targets our weak and vulnerable wills to abstain from things we want.

I’m not saying we should rid of all the technology in the world. But I think we should be cognizant as consumers that our collective decisions in the technological world can easily evolve our species. Just some food for thought.