OK, so here’s my official, official thesis everyone. But for real this time. C’mon, just hear me out:

We have become more and more dependent on technology (specifically the internet/computers), and truth is, we simply could not function without it. We use it for nearly every aspect of our lives . We fear losing this technology because we would be helpless without it. Proof of our legitimate  fear: popular culture likes to look at the concept of the power going out/technology controlling us. Technology doesn’t just help us anymore, technology defines us.

Please note:
Though my previous post, entitled “Some further clarification,” has the layout of a thesis with 3 supporting claims, it is a complete coincidence! I was merely trying to clarify my intent, I was not making an official thesis statement.

My actual thesis can be found under the page “Central Idea” and then the sub-page “An Official Thesis.”

Sorry for the confusion!

Ok, so I’ve been reading some of what I’ve been writing up until now, and I’ve realized that I myself can barely understand what my point is. As such, I’m clarifying my intent some more:

Fear of technology as been around since the Industrial revolution, but it has only increased as technology has become more and more integrated into our daily lives. Why do we fear technology so much? It seems that the more common it becomes, the more uneasy we get. I posit that all fears stem from feeling out of control. Therefore, the more that we rely on technology, the less we feel we can live without it. This automatically causes us to fear the technology which controls our lives. The more reliant we are, the more fearful we become.

• All fears stem from fear of loss of control (I’ll give examples)
• Proof that more and more books/movies center around technology taking over
• Reclaiming our lives – how plausible is a partial disconnect?

Hope that clears things up a bit…check out my rad sources!

So here it is…my official project proposal.

The topic I hope to elucidate is the fear which drives the technophobia of our day. In other words, what does this niggling fantasy we have about robots taking over say about us as a society? It seems that every era has its unique fears which get the population up in arms that the world as we know it will be destroyed. I think this topic has a wealth of information I can skim and speed-read my way through (take that, Nicholas Carr!) Hopefully, this will interest historians, scientists, and normal college dudes alike.

As of now, my thesis is something like: The reason we fear an imminent computer takeover is because we are in the Information Age. To us, the most valuable thing is acquiring and manipulating knowledge. The people we admire today are the geeks and the entrepreneurs, unlike the warriors and philosophers of old. And what is the only thing which we believe can be “smarter” than us humans? Why machines, of course! Their “brains” are infinitely faster and more adaptable than our own. It stands to reason that they may eventually replace us.

Over the course of my paper, I plan to go through a quick history of the prevailing fears and what they said about the people living during that time. I will then go on to the current fear, of machines taking over, and go through a brief history of when that began, and how it manifests itself today. This should lead me to assuaging fears that machines will actually take over (I’ll show how artificial intelligence is not very likely) and that we should all stop letting our imaginations run away with us.

Fears don’t represent truths. They represent insecurities.

Wish me luck!
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I was very confused when Nicholas Carr started off his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, with:

“I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article…The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle (5-6).”

He goes on and on about how difficult it has become for most people to read large chunks of text, yet here is writing a full-length book! How did he even manage to read his manuscript if it’s so difficult for him to concentrate? Obviously he has enough hope in people’s continued interest in reading full-length books for him to hazard writing a book himself.

Although this struck me as rather ironic, I did enjoy reading what Carr has to say. I was particularly intrigued by his chapter on Google, which gave a visitor to the Google headquarters’s impression that:

“The coziness [was] overwhelming…unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to Earth, what place would be better to hide? (174)”

This phrasing of something innately “evil” and “dark” and “Satanic” going on at Google struck me as odd. What’s so frightening about some computer geeks trying to crack algorithms? Surely what he saw was completely nonthreatening. So why did he feel such an immediate revulsion at machines being programmed to anticipate human thoughts? This led to me to wonder about the ever-present technophobia which is propagated in books and movies. Why does it exist? Shouldn’t we rejoice in having to do less work ourselves?

I hope to explore the root of our fear and prove that it really stems from natural human fears and that we  have nothing to be scared of as a race. It’s not that machines will dominate us, we’re just directing our inherent anxieties towards them.