Welcome to Let’s Have It, nice to see new commenters.

The question of balance is relevant to many aspects of life, and the marriage of human and technology should not be too one-sided. “Real life” will always exist, but is becoming more tech-augmented every day.

Future generations with mobile phones, GPS and the Internet may not appreciate maps, books and classic orientation with little more than the sun as a guide to where north is. But then, most of us don’t know how to make fire like prehistoric man did, and few of us can do arithmetic like people could before calculators. Striking a balance is the key point here, because one day where will we be if suddenly - for example - we don’t have power for our computers? What will remain of those tangible things which were such key references in the past?

-Fruey

Going back to the nostalgic past probably needs not a revolution but devastation and rebirth. But given the price of oil at the moment, who knows where we are heading?

-Fruey

Perhaps there will be a revolution (for some) where we return to the simpler things like conversations over dinner, gabbing over the back fence with neighbors and writing letters the old fashioned way (btw, I have a pen pal - LETTERS - and we’ve been writing for 24 years!!) Definitely adds a human element, although I love my email….

Heck! I remember a time when owning a TV was a luxury. Instead, we’d sit around the radio, eating home cooked meals with vegetables picked from a back yard garden.

There seems to be some contradiction, then, between saying that this technology “facilitates” human connections / communication when in fact it removes the need for true in the flesh contact.

I totally agree that anyone who cannot tell the difference needs more than just a reality check… but I wonder if the atrophy in human communication may not have deeper resonances in two or three generations time.

-Fruey

Personally, I think that anyone who cannot tell the difference between some sort of cyborg or artificial intelligence and the real thing needs to get more than just their heads examined.

Well solitary or shared pleasures are not, in my opinion, the same as a cyborg relationship where a human is replaced by a simulated human.

Battery operated “personal” devices are not the same as a device linked to a network and controlled at a distance. At this point, the line begins to blur but nothing that serious. However, what if the controller is software which starts to have elements of artificial intelligence and pretends to be human?

How does the human touch differ from the simulated cyborg, and what happens if a new generation stop being able to discern the difference? Are we facilitating human interaction or replacing it at this point?

You could draw a parallel with writing a letter or writing an email. There may not be a difference in the words you write, but there’s something more human about the letter, no? When we no longer write letters on paper with ink, have we not lost something?

-Fruey