[coberst]

Technology: The Modern Pied Piper

The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a story by Robert Browning detailing a legend regarding the abduction of children from the village of Hamelin in 1284.

The town of Hamelin was rat infested and the citizens hired a man, who described himself as a rat catcher, to rid them of their rats. The man accepted their offer and used a musical pipe to lure the rats into following him. He led them into the river where they drowned. Despite his success the town reneged and refused to pay him.

The man later returned to town one Sunday morning; while the citizens were in church he used the musical pipe to lure the town’s children into following him out of town. The children were never seen again.

Technology is our modern day version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Technology has enchanted the Global village, especially the young, with hand-held gadgets and various kinds of digital technology to the extent that reading and intellectual growth has become seriously hindered.

Sapiens seek titillation and seem to find it foremost in trivial pursuits; technology facilitates those pursuits while simultaneously facilitating a more comfortable standard of living.

Our lives are filled with clusters of goals to be achieved and means devised to reach those goals. We have proximate goals and ultimate goals that we try to make coherent throughout our lives.

When we focus our mental prowess on goals and the means for achieving those goals we come face to face with the fact that we spend great quantities of our intellectual energy on means and very little intellectual energy on long range ultimate goals.

Economics dominates our thought processes in matters of defining goals. We give insufficient intellectual energy toward moral values that will help us set useful long range goals.

When we examine the matter of means and ends we discover that we have become enchanted with technology as our Idol, it becomes the means to achieve whatever goals we might decide in the future. Technology, however, provides little help in establishing goals that can alleviate our most stressful problems.

[coberst]

There is a level of technology that becomes very dangerous for the species. It is that level when we humans have the power to easily destroy our self without the intellectual sophistication to prevent that from happening. We have long ago passed that point.

We do not allow children to drive because they lack the intellectual sophistication to handle such a dangerous situation. We are adolescents with far too much power for our level of sophistication.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')
The United States is in the midst of an energy revolution. Oil production has risen by 5 million barrels per day (bpd) since 2010, an increase of nearly 100 percent. New technology, particularly techniques in shale oil drilling, has opened up vast new opportunities for oil and gas companies. The proof is in the numbers. In 2017, the United States averaged 9.3 million bpd. This year, the EIA predicts that U.S. oil and gas production will reach record levels, averaging 10.3 million barrels bpd to surpass the record reached in 1970 (9.6 million bpd). In 2019, the EIA expects U.S. production to average 10.8 million bpd, which will allow the U.S. to rival Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s largest oil producer. If there’s one big reason for the U.S. energy revolution, it’s that new technology has allowed American companies to beat the

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('coberst', 'T')here is a level of technology that becomes very dangerous for the species. It is that level when we humans have the power to easily destroy our self without the intellectual sophistication to prevent that from happening. We have long ago passed that point.

We do not allow children to drive because they lack the intellectual sophistication to handle such a dangerous situation. We are adolescents with far too much power for our level of sophistication.