Can technology make a better world?

At this stage, we can’t deny that technology and also, science, has made life easier, simple and more enjoyable: it has made great contributions to human life. However, there still a lot to do for making a prosperous, sustainable and equitable world in the future. So we also have to consider if we are going in the right direction or if technology is injuring us. I think that we, as humans, should be able to control, lead or bring science and technology and not the other way. If we look through the years, we can see that technology has rapidly developed and had had a great impact on human life. Nowadays, everything in our life deals with science and technology, but we have to ask if our society has changed thanks or because technology development. 

We can think that technology hasn’t made the world an easier or a better place to live. It’s true that day to day, tasks and everything we do have become easier but it has been at the price of losing the ability to think for one's self and losing social interactions. People are getting used to don't think anything, we don’t remember information (or not make the effort of remembering it) because all of us know and expect that our phone, our computer, the Internet,…do it for use; everyone know that typing a question in Google means having an immediate answer… and more importantly: technology have had an important impact on human’s ability to interact with others. We are losing our manners, we’re impolite, we play with our IPad or phone when we’re supposed to be speaking with the person that we have in front of us (in that line, I recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgavjtcnC3o that talks about what happens around you while you’re looking your phone!). How many times have you seen a group of people in a restaurant looking their phones instead of looking each other? Or what's worse, how many times have you seen someone talking with a prson through the phone when they have ech other just in front?

I believe that technology should solve problems without creating new ones, and with this criterion, unfortunately, we could have an endless list of “technological advances” that didn’t lead to practical solution. For example, let’s take the use of the petroleum for make automobiles work. At the time, people thought that it was one of the best breakthroughs of the history of the mankind: your car could take you anywhere you wanted. But if we look closer, we would see that it emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide what contributes to the greenhouse effect, the global warming and increase the ozone depletion, what endangers the earth and the human life. 

For this, we should make science and technology a problem solver. Have you ever thought about how Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone? Well, so Bell, at that time, was facing a problem: he wanted to talk to his family even though he was miles away from them so this problem forced Bell to think and search a solution and, with hard work, he solve his problem by inventing the telephone. The same happens with the electric lamp of Thomas Edison: if he hadn’t been persistent enough to try until his 100th light bulb, he wouldn’t invent it; scientists would never have discovered the nuclear power founding a new energy called nuclear energy if they had felt content with hydroelectricity; or if after invent the pencil it hasn’t been the necessity of erasing what you have drawn, the rubber would have never seen the light. 

So we can look upon that technology has to sides: maybe we can say that we have get to a point at which we shouldn't reached, we’re in the midst of a "reverse evolution" in partly, due to our technology addition. For this, both science and technology, should be a never ending work in progress, it doesn’t mean that we are not allowed to relax and enjoy our progress, but being satisfied with our improvements will not lead in not moving and step forward. In the other hand, we can’t deny the fact that technology has improved our world, we only have to take as an example the medicine that continues to improve day by day.  

Summing up, technology is neither good or bad, but it’s powerful. It’s up to the people who develop and use it to determinate what effect it has on the world and it’s in our hands to use this powerful tool in ways that improve the world: it’s simple, science and technology can improve life if you work to improve science and technology.