Reflections on Lanier

Towards the end of Lanier's book You Are Not A Gadget we begin to see the authors reflections on the role of computers in our lives. In this section I feel he makes one of his most important points in that humans need to play a more important role than computers. We cannot let computers take over and rule our lives like we have thus far. We have let ourselves become stupid and allow our computers to run our lives. Things that were once basic tasks we now rely on computers to get accomplished. As Lanier preaches, we cannot precipitate this trend and instead need to defy it. While computers will always play a major role in our lives going forward we can't allow computers to completely take over our lives. As I discussed in an earlier blog post, computers have already started to take a dominant role in our economy, replacing millions of jobs. While this has certain benefits for sure, we are still uncertain of the long term effects, long term effects that in my perception are not going to be quite as good as the current benefits.

While I am not preaching that computers are terrible and that we can't rely on them to do certain tasks, I am saying that we cannot continue to rely more and more on our computers. We continue to create applications for them that dumb tasks down to make them easier. What we are in turn creating however is a society that without their computers is lost because they can't get anything done. We cannot let this happen and while I don't have the solution to this problem myself, this is something that we need to continue to work towards finding a solution for.