Living With Robots
Posted in Freshwater Angling on the February 7, 2010
Robotic machines are now an everyday part of our lives. Things such as computers, cars and even baseball softball pitching machines are used to help us in our everyday life. It’s quite simple to stand inside a batting cage and face a round of balls that appear to be identical to those pitched by a real human. What kind of moral questions do such creations bring out? Is it fine to be so reliant on machines? My worry is not with machines taking over our lives in any scary movie sense, I don’t predict batting cages to come to life and try to destroy us all, but our reliance on machines to do the work that was done by humans less than a hundred years ago marks a massive change in the way we live our lives. This behavior is worth pondering.
Obviously, with the inception of the internet, our whole way of thinking has been altered. It’s hard to consider what it would have been like for Native Americans, for example, or even Europeans who lived in a country setting. These people may have seen perhaps only a few hundred faces in their lifetime, while we may talk with that many humans within the course of just a year, and the amount of faces we see can barely be counted.
While the changes may seem insignificant, it has to be admitted that such a way of life will have effects on our brains themselves. It’s been discovered that the brain is physically altered by the sensations and emotions it receives, so to say what we perceive changes our brain is in no way over the top.
Has the growing use of robotics had a positive impact on our lives? If we consider this in terms of convenience and superficial happiness, there’s no question that it has. It has never been easier to have food and entertainment delivered to our door within minutes of our desire to have them. But this, obviously, is only true for those in wealthy situations within developed countries. In order to live like this, there are others in poorer countries who must do the work of making the shoes, joining the machines and building the boxes. It goes without saying that the majority of these workers will be poorly paid for their labor, as those in the developed areas would be unwilling to pay a larger price for things which we feel are our right.
Along with the violation of other humans is the violation of non-human life. The way we treat nature appears to be an almost abusive relationship, with humans simply taking what they can view around them and staking it out as his own.
Undoubtedly, such a destructive relationship with the world around us has begun to have largely damaging effects on the way we’re capable of living our own lives of comfort. When nature and machine come into conflict, it is nature that humans will have to have more in order to continue their survival. One would hope we are able to see this reality before it’s too late.