Do Gadgets Degrade Our Common Sense? 311
ShelleyPortet writes "In a world where gadgets are growing more sophisticated, human behavior is changing — and not in a good way. That is what Robert Vamosi, author of When Gadgets Betray Us argues in his book, which examines the dangers of our growing dependence on technology. As gadgets develop the ability to multitask seemingly endless functions, Vamosi argues that people are increasingly unable to think for themselves. 'Instead of lifting our heads, looking around and thinking for ourselves,' Vamosi writes, some of us no longer see the world as human beings have for thousands of years and simply accept whatever our gadgets show us."
you can't assume something is lost (Score:4, Informative)
that never existed in the first place
"some of us no longer see the world as human beings have for thousands of years and simply accept whatever our gadgets show us"
LOL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_blind_leading_the_blind [wikipedia.org]
certain people have always blindly accepted what was in front of them, and certain other people looked around and challenged their own assumptions. the proportion between these classes of people is innate, a random spread, a constant of the human condition. so it always was, so it is, so it always will be
technology is not changing essential human nature
Re:Death by GPS (Score:3, Informative)
Stupid people do stupid things. How many people do you think died back when they crossed those areas in a wagon? or in cars back in the 40-50's? People are no more stupid today then they were "back then" because of gadgets. It just makes "good" (i.e. sells papers) to print sensationalistic crap like that.
How many people died when the US was being settled? If you read books and accounts from that era, it was common for more knowledgeable people in the trading outposts and such to make fun of people heading up into the wilderness unprepared. This isn't "new" and is isn't because of "gadgets" stupid people get themselves killed all the time.
Re:Medical technology and future generations (Score:4, Informative)
One thing that I wonder about is how medical technology will affect the human genome. For example, in earlier centuries, women with narrow birth canals, and their babies, frequently died in childbirth. Now, the lives of such women (and their babies) are saved via Cesarian section, and the selection pressure against genetic variations (mutations) that produce narrow birth canals has been reduced. In future generations, how much effect will this have on the anatomy of the average woman? After ten, or fifty, or five hundred generations, might we be in a situation in which childbirth without Cesarian section is no longer possible?
No, that will be decided by the lawyers.....
Back on topic - you making a few assumptions that don't necessarily hold. Narrow birth canal outlets can happen, but aren't especially common and more importantly are not the major reason for C-sections. Maternal deaths were typically due to 1) hemorrhage and 2) infection - neither one due much to genetics.
The broader question of what modern medicine is doing to change human genetics is harder to answer. Yes, we are keeping people alive that would not have reached sexual maturity in the 'olden days', but we're also preventing many deaths of otherwise healthy individuals that do become sexually (and in the case of humans, perhaps more importantly), socially active. Finally one has to be very careful ascribing evolutionary fitness to any given trait. It's common in the lay literature to suggest that some random trait (brain size, penis size, nostril size) improves evolutionary fitness and therefore was selected. Humans are fairly slow growing and haven't been around for all that long (in the geological time frame sense) - a lot of traits are carried along and not necessarily 'selected'. Anyway.
It's complicated.