标题: ISSUE30 【dies in flames】 by winning1030 [打印本页] 作者: winning1030 时间: 2009-4-8 13:39:56 标题: ISSUE30 【dies in flames】 by winning1030
30"The primary goal of technological advancement should be to increase people's efficiency so that everyone has more leisure time."
In all ages, the eternal theme for human is the pursuit of more convenient and abundant material life. Technology, which enriches human’s knowledge and improves mankind's ability, provides probabilities to fulfill desires of people for different purposes and thus realizes the dream. However, only can this ideal life be reached in harmony with nature. Thus, the primary goal of technological advancement should be to create better living standards on the premise of the harmony between human and nature.
To increase people's efficiency indeed can provide mankind with more convenient and abundant material life. Throughout the history, the enhancement of effienciency, to a large extent, does contribute to the development of human society with the improvement of quality of life. Take the revolution of transportation for example. Long ago, human had to visit each other to communicate by foot when the conception of transportation hadn't been created. At that time, the undeveloped traffic served as tremendous obstacle to conveyance of information with the cost of a mass of time and physical strength. Later with technological advancement, carriage and bycicle were invented in succession, which meliorated the inconvenient communication. It was in 1766 that the first steam engine, which started the Industrial Revolution and brought a qualitative leap in the living standard of human being, was invited by Watt. As technology advances constantly, plane which was first invented in 1903, regarded as the most efficient transportation, has largely shorten the time and energy of transmission of messages. For instance, from Tibet in China to New York, the cost of time could be reduced from even several years in the past on foot with hardship to only a snooze in a comfortable plane. Thus, we can see that greater efficiency makes for high quality of life.
However, the increase of efficiency doesn't guarantee everyone more leisure time despite a lot of advantages it brings. On the one hand, although high efficiency save human an enormous amount of time, human doesn't necessarily enjoy the saved time as leisure time, and instead, people probablely devote the saved time to gaining more benefit grounding on that mankind's nature is to seek for maximization of interest. So in a given time, even though there is pleny of time left, people may prefer to work in order to create extra value. The
fast tempo of modern life in this fiercely competitive era when people's leisure time seem to be much less than that of age of agriculture although efficiency has been raised more than hundreds of times, is an obvious example to support, with the reason that people have to avoid being eliminated so that they chose to sacrifice their leisure time to work and learn to maintain their competitiveness. On the other hand, human has to make up for the serious outcome with time, money and energy when high efficiency blindly is pursued, which also means diminishment of leisure time. Regardless of the significance of harmony between nature and human, we are confronted with numbers of ecological pollution, such as atmospheric pollution, water pollution and soil contamination, which are caused directly by human's excessively eager desire to achieve rapid economical growth based on high efficiency. Unreasonable use of ecological resources, such as destruction of forest caused by overgrazing and providing additional cropland, makes people now are reaping the consequences of global warming and so on so that we have to take much time to protect our earth our survival must depend on. Therefore, the argument that to increase people's efficiency can bring everyone more leisure time is weakened.
In addition, high efficiency can't meet all the needs in diverse fields in society if the primary goal of technological advancement is to increase people's efficiency. In some areas, such as medicine, effective and safe treatment method, rather than efficiency is more emphasized because if no effective and safe cure can be found, let alone its efficiency to contribute to patients' convalescence. Consequently, albeit efficiency is also an important factor to consider, effective and safe cure is a necessary precondition which makes efficiency inferior. Clearly, high efficiency as the primary goal of technological advancement is too narrow to generalize the demands in all aspects.
As a result, the primary goal of technological advancement, in my viewpoint, is to create better living standards for people, in which more leisure time is involved, on the premise of the harmony between human and nature while to increase people's efficiency is just one way to reach the goal. It must be pointed out that maintenance of harmony is the guaranty of human's comfortable life, although the ultimate aim for mankind is the maximization of self interest. On condition that human are faced with the disruption of ecological balance, we can't go any further and the happy life would not last long. The end, if abuse of technology is made, could only be rattrap for human beings. Realizing the insightful principle, every country now are trying to control the nuclear weapons and call on people over the world to protect the earth. It can be seen that to create better living standards for people and maintenance of harmony between human and nature are inseparable as the primary goal of technological advancement.
In conclusion, the development of human society must follow law of nature. The pursuit of better quality of life should be combined with the premise of the harmony between human and nature as the primary goal of technological advancement.