As people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate.

As people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.

With the rapid development of technology nowadays, more and more daily problems once needed us to deal with can be easily solved. This convenience technology has brought to us, though, a new concern that we might deteriorate in the ability to think for ourselves. This statement might be true considering special circumstances. However, to view this statement in a grander scale, we can see the effort of thinking we paid to develop these technology and solving those newly raised problems. So, I disagree with this statement.

It is true that some of our abilities might deteriorate as the technology takes the place of human in many fields of thinking. Especially when the process is repetitive and strictly ruled, our human brains might get exhausted and produce a lot of mistakes, while computer and other newly developed technologies can perform better. As technology replaces us in these thinking processes, we perform less of these thinking while the actual outcome becomes much more precise, and we no longer consider these processes as thinking once crucial to us. With reduced importance attached to and less practice performed in these thinking processes, it is for sure that our ability of thinking will deteriorate from these aspects. For example, the ability to calculate once was needed even when a housewife wanted to check her bills. However, now with the help of calculators and advanced computers, the most complex calculation that a scientist or an engineer needs to work out can be easily solved within seconds. So the deterioration of our ability to calculate or to accomplish other thinking processes that can be replaced by new technology is unavoidable.

Despite these abilities that might deteriorate, though, we should also see the inspiration that new technology can bring to us. Indeed these technologies themselves are the outcomes of our thinking. It is our intentional seeking for improvement of life quality that induced the development of technologies. To enhance the connection of people far away, mobile and Internet were invented to swiftly convey messages, while robots were built to free us from dangerous and tiring work. Thus, to develop a useful technology that can be applied to various circumstances, human need the ability of thinking to draft a rough blueprint of the technology. With the intention of the technology clear, people then need to apply the know scientific principles to realize their imagination, from the basic Newton’s laws to the frontier of science, such as Einstein’s relativity theory. Furthermore, the ability of thinking is also required for improvement of the technology even after its birth. So it can be questionable that how these technologies can develop so fast, if our ability to think has been deteriorating.

Last but not the least, new technologies also has brought us many new problems that still need us to solve, while providing us convenience with solutions to the old ones. So to further solve these newly raised problems, we still need to think creatively. The wide application of automobiles, for example, while providing us with convenience of traveling, also has raised problems in traffic and pollution. We need to come up new stipulations to control the number of automobiles, and to develop new methods to purify the emission. It is our ability to think for ourselves that enables us to deal with the shortcomings of these new technologies and to make good use of them. Thus, human thinking has never been out of date, and we still rely on our abilities to solve many problems which is even more complicated than the old ones. Before, we used our wisdom to reduce life struggle, while now we change our focus to vital problems which need to be solved to maintain sustainable development. However, regardless of the content our thinking is about, we think no less than in the past, and our ability to think does not deteriorate.

To conclude, the statement regarding our deterioration in the ability to think for ourselves is at least partly incorrect. The development of technology itself has already proved the improvement of our thoughts, while the solution to these new problems created by technology requires us to think continuously. Although, it might be true that some aspects in our ability to think has deteriorated, our ability to think has not been challenged while regarding as a whole.