A try on the issue in GRE

As people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate.

Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.

   As the statement says, recent decades have witnessed a boom of technology. We use calculators to count, World Wide Web to search and Google Map to find directions. We get much convenience from technology, but we also rely on it too much. Some people can’t even do a simple math without calculators and nobody can imagine a life without smartphones or the Internet. Some people draw a conclusion from these phenomena that the ability of humans to think will surely deteriorate due to technology.

However, from my point of view, the technology has no logical and inevitable connection with humans’ thinking ability. As long as the human society is developing, humans’ thinking ability will never deteriorate. Actually, given the long long history of technology, the boom of inventions in recent decades is just a normal phenomenon. From the very beginning of human history, our ancestors started inventing to help them solve different problems, but all these technologies didn’t stop our from thinking more, because there are still lots of complicating problems waiting to be solved, no matter in the nature or in human society. Take the invention of rocket for example, scientists have to rely on rocket to explore the universe, but it was only a beginning. Scientists are faced with new strange problems, so the technology of outer space keeps developing at an incredible speed. In all fields, humans keep coming up with new ideas to solve problems and to change the world and this process is endless.

What’s more, technology can actually improve humans’ brainpower. For some talented people, like scientists or engineers, their responsibilities are to develop new technology on the basis of the old one, which requires even more of the thought process. For most ordinary people, although they don’t need to invent anything, it still requires thinking hard just to catch up with the changing technology. For instance, there are few people who can say proudly that they have a good command of using all functions of the iPhone. Both inventing and using technology will require a high level of thinking ability. Last but not least, it’s technology that releases humans’ energy from boring and repeated thinking work into more creative fields. If we have to write every single letter as we did two hundred years ago, how can we have time to enlarge our factory or companies? If we have to look through piles of books just for one piece of information, how can we invent drugs to defend ourselves from terrible cancers?

    In conclusion, it’s not the level of existing technology but the desire to build a better human society that determines whether the ability of humans to think will improve.