Impact of technology on people's ability to think
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Computer Technologies have significantly changed the human life in the twentieth century, and the premise is that information technology has arguably been the most important driver of change in our lives and will carry on to be so far at least the next several decades is completely true. Computer has altered every aspect of our life from a social standpoint to the most importantly a communication standpoint. As a result of this change there was a clash between computer technology and human values especially in the mid of the last century when the first generation of computers was produced. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was one of the most innovative, influential and controversial thinker of the twentieth century and there is no philosopher describes the conflict of human value and technology so precisely as Heidegger.
Unfortunately, Heidegger died before seeing the most powerful technological revolution and the wide spread of microcomputer, he just saw the first generation of computers, but the nature of his work allows him to cover the hole between the period before computers and after, and therefore his writings become the starting point for the other thinkers to identify with the new situation of the technology and the societies.
Heidegger when he coupled between being and time, he knew that reality changes and with it the task of thinking. He sensed the rapidity of change in the twentieth century, and he appeared to predict what librarians grasp today: “the image of humanist scholar in the book-crammed study, thinking deep thoughts, will continue to be less and less viable in the professional scholarship.”(Holibaugh, 1988). This recent notice by Holibaugh the director of Olin and Chalmers libraries at Kenyon College prove what Heidegger in his writings assumed: our rapid technological advance challenges the legacy of human thinking (Heim, 1993).
By the mid-twentieth century there were some philosophical views have argued that the computer appears as a rival intelligence that challenges the human being to a contest (Heim, 1993). Hubert Dreyfus the professor of philosophy in University of California Has studied the danger of computers and he conclude that we must know exactly what computers can and what computers can’t do, Dreyfus said that the mid–twentieth century culture tended to read the human being as an information processing system and the researchers described the brain as a programmed digital computer. Dreyfus noted that the brain can be described as processing information because its physicality and this will leads us into unexamined dogma that the human thinking operates in formal patterns and that appropriately programmed computers possibly will repeat thought patterns. If computers could repeat thought patterns, might we not then reasonable say that computer think or have artificial intelligence (Heim, 1993). Dreyfus continued to argue that the human thinking and expertise depend primarily on unconscious instincts rather than conscious symbolic manipulation and these unconscious abilities could never be obtain in formal systems. Dreyfus critique was based on modern philosopher like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus applied Heidegger’s critique of technology to computers, but he understand the computer too narrowly as an artificial intelligence device and he saw the computer only as opponent. Dreyfus wrote in the introduction of his book What Computers Still Can’t Do (1992), “Artificial intelligence, our programs to a great degree are problems rather than solutions. If a researcher tries to write an “understanding” program, it isn’t because he has thought of a better way of implementing this well-understood task, but because he hopes he can come closer to writing the first implementation. If he calls the main loop of his program “UNDERSTANDING”, he is (until proven innocent) merely begging the question. He may mislead a lot of people, most prominently himself, and enrage a lot of others.”
Very different point of view from Dreyfus’s belief which instead of regarding the computer as a potential rival it is better to interface with computers. The computers play a fundamental role in human life and it have many purposes and it has used in various types of environments, such as educational, medical, entertainment, and so on. Computer has become an important thread in the texture of the human civilization and human daily reliance on computers influences the way the culture proceeds in everything. As a result, the research and the development today are moving away from the artificial intelligence to research in human computer interaction, including information environment “virtual reality” by augmented human bodily perception.