Subject: Are new technologies necessarily an idea of progress ?

Steve Jobs once said: "Technology alone is not enough" and this a good way to introduce my essay. Our inventors have always imagined new machines of everyday life, from the simple electric whisk to the latest generation multi-cooker robot. In the 1970s some people thought that future years would be synonymous with flying cars and robots. In France in the mid-19th century Felix L. Edoux made his invention of the elevator known to the public. All those industrials revolutions can be used to improve our daily lives and I will try to answer them in this essay.

To begin with, I would use the second document called "The Intelligent Revolution" which lists some technological developments. The first calculating machines, like the old IBM-1401, were very huge and much slower than now. Indeed, it could take the place of a whole room and cost up to £1 million. The human had to rethink our way of thinking and optimizes all this by creating the mobile. It doesn’t cost more than £50, the microchip is smaller than the size of a finger and performs nearly 1 billion calculations per second (300,000 times faster than the old IBM-1401). Apparently, by 2020, this chip will cost only a penny, it showing that the evolution is constant and that the technology of tomorrow will always catch up with that of yesterday. Progress is constant. Our world is smarter than 10 years ago and the power of the machines doubles every 18 months. Autonomous cars are a new technology of the 21st century, being able to let a car drive alone by itself safely. Then in this video document, it explained how does it works: the car uses a GPS and laser sensors (still new technologies) to find the way and avoid obstacles. In the third document, called "Creating intelligent Machines", it is said that robots can only do 2 basic tasks. One is to see and the other is to hear. However, they are not able to understand what they see and hear. Even if they competes with humans, until today the robots are not autonomous and require engineers. Scientists wanted to combine knowledge in robots with knowledge in neuroscience to understand the human’s way of thinking and try to recreate it in a robot. Nevertheless there are many limits to that and soon all this could be out of control.

Indeed, if our machines are able to think like a human and make different decisions in each case, then it can provoke a climate of fear and panic. The first document entitled "The Materializer" can illustrate these dangers, since the scientist pronounces a word, the object appears in the machine. It may sounds good and useful but when he pronounces the word "girl", an 8 years-old girl appears naked and that is when the situation takes a different turn. Ned, scared, startles and shouts "Hell!" and what he had asked appears in the machine, two charred skeletons in the smouldering rubble. This text inspires something real for me when at the request of a girl and he doesn't specify the clothes, it can seems like Adam and Eve and therefore to creation for example. This little story of science-fiction illustrates the progress of technology but also the limits when it does not have one. In this case it is necessary to improve and adapt to the needs of each person.

Finally, I would say that new technologies fit perfectly into the idea of progress and that we are increasingly entering into the futuristic fantasy

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