Friday, January 24, 2014

Is Technology Killing Us?
I think of myself as an athlete, but can the rest of people on earth say the same? According to the world health organization, 1.4 billion people are overweight in the world we live in today. That’s one fifth of earth’s population. Now, what could possibly be the cause of this absurd statistic? Technology.

As technology has advanced, humans have gotten lazier. It’s not like we stopped working hard, it’s that we shifted our skill set to a more intellectual way of life. We go to school, do homework, and the process repeats itself over and over again. 1000 years ago, there were no cars or an
y means of transportation that are as efficient as in today’s world. Therefore we spent less time sitting down doing nothing and spent more time actually physically working to continue to live to see tomorrow. This way of life continually challenged our bodies to the point where only the very elite of people were overweight.




The movie WALL-E clearly illustrated that as technology advanced, humans were ultimately left to sit in floating chairs with 100% body fat. But are we truly headed into this direction of being subhuman? The answer is, maybe. The point of advancing technology is to make things easier or more efficient. And if humans continue to create technology to make things easier in life, then humans will continue to suffer from physical issues such as obesity.







 
You’re probably thinking that there seems to be little to no hope for humanity, but technology has a few benefits. Besides the risky surgeries and overrated diets, there is a wrist band to help stimulate your sense of being healthy. This fitness tracking band is called fitbit. Besides telling the time, this piece of technology helps you sleep better, eat better, which in turn makes you healthier and gets you active in a new, fun, and exciting way. Although it is a good source of motivation and may help some people live a healthy life, it will not help people if they are not ready to change their life or are too far from being helped. It is not a miracle bracelet.


Whether you have positive or negative views on how technology is hurting the human body, the truth is revealed in the statistics that are increasing each year. The threat of technology destroying our humanity is out there. If we don’t do anything to stop it from changing us, then were doomed to be just like the oversized behemoths from WALL-E.  

2 comments:

  1. Roy- The relationship between technology and obesity seems pretty clear, but finding some research to support your idea would strengthen this. Mexico just became the most obese country in the world, but the news suggests it's more about a rising middle class and a changing diet than technology. The fitbit is an ironic technological solution to a potentially technological problem. You should add a link and perhaps an image here. The Wall-E image certainly makes a comically unhealthy ending image.

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  2. I agree with your message that as technology advances and is more capable, humans have to do less work and therefore become less healthy but I think that it might be a less noticeable trend. We are slowly changing our lifestyle to a less active one that everyone might not notice, making it harder to prevent. I like the WALL-E example because I think it is an accurate guess of what will happen to us. The people started using the floating chairs for health reasons but then everyone started using them because it was easier than walking around. People are so infatuated and enticed by technology that they don't think about the consequences of using it.

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