Bac notion idea of progress

Hello,

I’m going to present you the notion of “idea of progress”. So, the notion of progress can be defined as an improvement, an evolution or a change in order to make the world a better place. Along history, great progress encountered most of the time significant opposition because some people weren’t comfortable with the great changes they involved. Thus, it can bring us to ask ourselves:

To what extent the progress and the development of new technologies impacts positively today’s society?

First, we will see that the main purpose of progress is improve our way of life. Then, we will approach the limits and the possible drifts linked to new technologies.

First of all, let’s talk about these innovations, now part of our life, created by inspiring innovators. Thus, innovations are often unconventional projects that can be linked to any field. For example, Apple is an MNC specialized in electronic devices that now have more than 2 billion active devices worldwide. In the space sector, we can see Space X developing a new type of rocket designed for reuse, and in the field of sustainable development, we can mention solar panels but, of course, there are many more innovations. An interesting point is that their designers were all visionaries of their time, people who believed in their ideas without ever giving up. They were all up to face the world’s challenges and that’s still the case. In the future, with the rising population, we will need sustainable cities able to accommodate large numbers of people. This will require solving the problems of the lack of place, suburban sprawl, pollution and the production of renewable resources.

Nevertheless, I’m sure that it will be possible to develop those eco-friendly or green cities through a new generation of innovators and innovations. As an example, we can talk about the wooden towers that are built all over the world to low the carbon footprint related to concrete constructions. So, the purpose of progress and innovations stay the same: facilitate and improve our way of life.

However, it’s not rare that inventions are divert from its initial use and generate bad consequences. In the workplace, although technology improve productivity, efficiency, collaboration between people, the other side of the coin is less glowing.

In fact, many people are afraid or disturbed by machines and robots. For instance, because of the information overload, some employees feel more stressed, others feel watched by their employers through cameras, and above all, many are concerned about the threat of job elimination, the fact that robots may be replacing humans.

Moreover, this fear of cutting-edge technologies has developed with the emphasis of all the drifts of technology by films and tv series such as Terminator or Humans.

Indeed, the more disturbing machines are the artificial intelligences. Even if they are created to help us in everyday life like for household chores or in hospitals to welcome the patients, AI are quite creepy notably when they look like humans.

Beyond their appearance, we can see, the major point of criticism against AI and finally against all electronic devices, it’s that they can be hacked and used against us.

What more terrifying than being killed by a robot? Besides, one we bought!? According to Stephen Hawking, that artificial intelligences wipe out humanity when it gets too clever as humans will be like ants. So that AI become far more intelligent than we are by their own and cause the end of the human race by accident. Of course, it’s an apocalyptic vision, but we can’t predict what will happened in the future.

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