Has Man succumbed to Technology?

If I remember correctly, it was class four, our first computer class and the first thing my teacher told us was - “computer is the dumbest servant. It does what you tell it to do, follows your command blindly and has no intelligence of its own.” So basically man had made a machine which would follow what s/he says and would do the task thus ‘ordered’. Technology, machines, gadgets were all made by human for its convenience, betterment and accuracy in work but of late things seems to have changed. With recurring growth in technology, high dependence of man on machine has somewhat generated an inferiority complex in humans.  All of a sudden people have started questioning their own intelligence and capabilities when compared to these inventions.

Recently I came across this random event whereby there would be a tea time discussion on the fact that ‘is your smart phone smarter than you?’ This event made me think of the situation where we are almost giving up in front of technology, which, not to be forgotten, has been developed by man. It might just be a random get together having some casual talk about the matter. But the whole idea of discussing over the given topic of whether the smart phone is smarter than man himself, does leave a spark in my brains which suggests that somewhere or the other may be at the farthest corner of the heart but man do today feel that technology is overtaking his intelligence. Now, this is just one f the many such events happening around us. One basic example can be the promotional activities of Google. Every now and then we come across phrases like – ‘if your name is not google, stop behaving as if you know everything’ or may be ‘the only thing google has failed to do till now is, fail!’. This certainly demands a lot of thought to be put in. For something which was made by us for our convenience and betterment of work to overdo us, this fear in man’s life can be dreadful. May be in this case it’s a marketing proposition by these smart phone manufacturers or even on other instances a marketing gimmick to promote their product but somewhere somehow such a promotional pattern can strongly effect human psychology and for no good.

This kind of an ideology, according to me can probably have one of the two repercussions. Either we will try to uplift our morals and test our abilities and intelligence every now and then which shall make us even better and proficient. On the contrary (rather what is actually happening) we shall succumb to the technology and accept the fact that we are nowhere in competition with machine. This would make us more and more dependent on them rather than believing in ourselves. Why do we tend to forget that the smart phone thus made with all those features is still made by man, or all the information we find on google is filled in there by man. It is not the site or the machine that works or does things it is made to do things and man makes the machine do it. I am not against growth in technology but I would just want to rephrase what Sir George Barnard Shaw once said – Man maketh machine, machine does not maketh man.