This book is a collaborative work performed by students from SKEMA Business School participating to the "Technology Improvements and Evolution of the Society" elective course during Spring 2015.
For many decades now, there has been a huge debate over the impact of technology in our society. Technology, as a source of evolution and innovation for mankind´s everyday life, has probably been the most important factor in the changing of our behaviors and cultural practices.
Since the invention of writing, into the modern press and all the way to the personal computer and the internet, technology has impacted humans even into developing different ways of life. This can be explained by the egg and chicken paradox. The egg asks the question if we create technology in order to satisfy our needs, just like Alexandre Graham Bell created the telephone device so we could communicate with others. Then there´s the chicken, which implies that technology has molded our needs and has shaped them accordingly. In this case, we can take a look at the cellular phone. All of our society now lives and acts based on these small devices, and they have changed our way of interacting with others immensely.
Now, it was mentioned before, a debate over the actual impact of technology has been around for a while, especially the last couple of decades. Some people believe that technology has been a great source of innovation and improvement in our society. Contemporary philosophers and icons have said that, without technology, the world would not be the same. A very special example would be Arthur C. Clarke, who said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic”.
On the other hand, there are many who think technology is doing harm to humans because of the wrong use we put into it. This thought, proposed by the Luddites, says that humans are starting to become more and more enslaved to these improvements, and some people like Jacques Ellul or Jean Francois Brient even believe that the whole system, especially the governments and big companies, are using these technology to push people into behaving like non-thinking, automated beings. A strong phrase by Sydney J. Harris can explain this very accurately: “The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers”.