Is technology an excuse for laziness?

Technology has a special knack for encouraging fear. People seem to love concocting dystopian futures brought upon by advancements gone wrong, where threats of killer machines, rogue AI and nuclear wastelands challenge humanity. While these may seem far-fetched, one apocalyptic fantasy is becoming a potential reality – mass laziness as displayed in Pixar’s Wall-E.

Alongside its beautiful tale of love and friendship, the 2008 film also deals out a side-story with chilling warning. The humans featured are obese, confined to chairs, with their lives directed and dictated by the machines aboard the Axiom, all because of their dependence on their automated lifestyle. They live in their own bubble, and only when this system malfunctions do they start to notice others around them. While this may seem like a joke, there are genuine fears that this is a future we are heading towards, either by choice or by force.

While this is an easy trap to fall into, if we don’t want to mimic this lifestyle we don’t have to…

With regard to people choosing the path of laziness, many point towards the amazing yet potentially detrimental abilities of the smartphone. They see how it has removed the need for once basic skills, made us more distractible and consider it to have a negative impact on social interaction. By using this simple device, it’d be exceptionally easy to mimic the lives of the humans in Wall-E. From the comfort of your own home you can have almost anything delivered to you, watch almost any film or television show ever made and can have almost any question you could think of answered. And all without having to speak to anyone.

However, while this is an easy trap to fall into, if we don’t want to mimic this lifestyle we don’t have to. Despite all the fearmongering research, it is suggested that smartphones improve our lives more than diminish it. If we can use these features without becoming dependent on them, we can actually be more social and communicative. With the multitude of fitness apps available, we can become more active, not less. Arguments of distractibility have been made against many technologies over time including books, radio and newspapers; we’ll always find ways to distract ourselves. Phones are just our current tool.

The worry is that more jobs will disappear than new ones appear…

So what about the second option-being forced into laziness? Here, I’m referring the concerns around an upcoming modern industrial revolution. Again we’ll see automation replace human workers to improve efficiency and reliability, however unlike previous times there are fears that the restructure of workers in society won’t be possible. The worry is that more jobs will disappear than new ones appear.

Many have compared these concerns to very similar ones during the last industrial revolution, though the scale of our upcoming one could be much larger. A major difference is that due to artificial intelligence, it won’t just effect lower skilled work, but could impact more academic fields as well. The first group of people who are believed to be widely effected are those who drive for a living with autonomous vehicles being very close to mass release. Bus drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, delivery drivers – all would become unnecessary, along with many involved with the admin of these professions. Perhaps scarier for us university students however are beliefs that AI could take over in more scientific areas too. Analytics, accounting, teaching, meteorology, medicine and many, many more are all areas where researchers believe AI may soon dominate.

Society will surely adapt as it always has…

But before you start freaking out, I’d argue that this isn’t the end of the world. These developments won’t happen over night, and may not have the drastic effect people believe they might. And even if they do, society will surely adapt as it always has. After all, with fewer jobs to be performed by humans, societal pressure may shift away from getting people into work. Sure, some people may become ‘lazy’, but everyone will have more time to spend how they want to, and isn’t that a good thing?