Technology: the Curse of Our Creation - Essay Example

Technology: the Curse of Our Creation Technology has immensely changed the world we see today. It has changed man’s ability to control the environment and to adapt with it. Early humans began to use technology when they converted natural resources like stones and gravel to simple tools by sharpening them and using them for hunting. Then gradually, mankind advanced. Wheels were invented to facilitate travelling and that was indeed one of the most remarkable achievements of man to date. Today, we see wheels being used in every device; refrigerators, cars, engines to name a few. Technology has never been on a standstill. Since mankind’s creation, technology has been developing as an attempt to make life easier. Technology refers to the usage and knowhow of the tools, crafts, techniques, systems, organizations and everything else that makes life simpler (Evans, et al., 2010). Technological advancements of the modern world include the telephone, the printing press and the internet. They have all played a role in overcoming barriers of distance that governed the world in the past and made the world a global village. Technology has made us achieve so much in life that today we are literally slaves of it. Not many of us will be able to survive in a world where there are no air conditioners and fans for our ease during summers, no heaters and boilers during winters, no electricity, no gas supply, no mobile phones, no computers and no television and other media. Where technology has made us reach the skies by astounding progress in the business world, remarkable achievements in the medical world and lots of money in the economic world; it has also led to a lot of negativities in today’s world (Li & Bernoff, 2008). It has made our lives so simple yet with it come a lot of vices and problems. We are captivated in our own trap today. Man made technology to make life simple and easy and this technology complicated nearly everything in the world. It is a sobering thought that mankind has become a slave of his own creation. Many digital artists in the world are trying to help humanity get out of this trap and lead a better life. They do so by introducing more technology, sadly, but this kind of technology is perceived to make our lives easier and better in quality. It is thought that these digital artists and companies will help us overcome our dependence on technology and beat the fraud that we encounter in day to day life with technology (Stein, 2008). It is said that for every blessing there is a price to pay, just like that there is the negative and darker side of one the greatest blessings of this era, technology. On the one hand expansion in technology has given us new horizons to explore, new tools in our hands through which we can change the world, we can do magical things using mere keyboard, but on the other hand technology has somehow blurred the actual meaning of life and relationships that are needed to survive out of the equation. Where technology has reduced distances in communications, it had increased distances many folds where they actually matter. The words of handwritten letter that used to bring tears to the relatives eyes when they were read had reduced to mere pixels that convey no emotions whatsoever (Kays, 2009). Our strong bonds with our friends with whom we spent hours at a time sharing feelings have been changed to wall posts and likes and dislikes on Facebook. Those pictures of the newborns which can make our grandparents swoon with happiness as if they can actually feel the baby by caressing the picture have been reduced to jpegs. On the one hand where we are proud to say that we can literally change the world with our own fingers with days spent sitting in front of the computer screen, but on the other hand we fail to realize that the time we are spending looking at the screen growing ever proud of our digital creation has been spent in complete isolation. We say that ultimately we are working for the betterment of the world where the things we create using our own fingers will do our work for us, but in doing work for the greater good we ignore countless relations whom we forget due to our new slave master, technology. We say that technology is more of a blessing than curse but sadly it is more likely the reverse. With easy communication edging ever so slightly the digital developers brought us Skype. Even though Skype too is a creation of technology and it is because of new technology such as webcams and online picture capturing that we are able to see our friends and family who are thousands of miles away. Even though, Skype too is making us more dependent on technology, it is also providing a breakthrough to it. Just like it is said that only fire burns out fire, its technology that counters technology. Since people have begun to rely so much on online networking, online jobs are a common thing these days. There are a lot of people whose incomes depend on sources that are related to the Internet alone. There’s Paypal and Moneygram amongst lots of others that provide a means of transferring money from one party to the other. However, these online transactions have led to lots of fraud (Barreca, 2005). People have registered as experts and employees with no degrees whatsoever. They just have a knowhow of using the Internet and they bluff the innocent users who use these sites thinking they are verified and accredited. However verified and accredited they may be, no website can check for the degrees of each individual expert owing to time constraints, budget constraints and unlimited areas of access (Wells, 2007). Therefore, in the last five years fraud has increased dramatically. One recent case was that of 52 year old mother of two Cassie Lengham. After registering onto an online dating site the 52 year old met a man claiming to be a soldier based in Iraq. Conversations were never on the telephone but on instant messenger. As conversations began to frequent the trust began to grow until the Ms Lengham had lent the man over $200,000. Where technology has gone evidently our naivety has followed. Fraud has also perpetrated e-commerce and fraud via the Internet has boomed over the past years. In the findings of the British Crime Survey, the 2004 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey and other administrative reports, it was seen that among eligible 18 to 25 years old, 16% of the individuals admitted that they had been involved in falsified work expenses, and 4% of the people using credit cards had been victims of fraud. The crime in technology is not only limited to fraudulent work expenses and credit cards. In households who participated in the survey, 27% of them said that their home computer had been ransacked by viruses in the past one year. The survey also found that there was a significant increase in the number of household computers affected by viruses over the duration of the survey compared to previous trends. Moreover, illegal downloads of movies and songs and usage of illegal software was very common, with more than 25% of the surveyed group accepting that they had been involved in such activities over the past year. The surveyed group expressed concern over the privacy of information on the Internet and had resisted from indulging in any act of buying online because of the fraud sellers that are rampant on the Internet (Wilson, Patterson, Powell & Hembury, 2006). People hack and use other people’s debit and credit cards to buy online. Internet hacking has also become a major issue in today’s word, and has raised concerns by people regarding the confidentiality of their personal information. One of the most important negative impacts of the technology which has actually taken over today’s world is the fact that this technology is making its users lazy. This indolence has a huge impact over lives and is in certain ways, ruining it. The craze for video games has also had an impact on youth culture. When most remember their childhood playing outdoors the newer generations have memories of static entertainment. This has led to many being lethargic and inactive. Corporations have exploited these addictions through games. When playing a video game the frontal lobe of the brain is most active, this area of the brain also controls addiction. Once this part of the brain is used regularly it leads to serious addiction which leads to idleness. Video games have a huge hand to the ever increasing rate of obesity. No physical exercise would mean no to any exertion which further means ever increasing fatty deposits and high rate of obesity. Obesity can be injurious to health which can lead to serious heart problems. We today, do not realize what obesity is doing to us but it is actually leading to destruction of our life styles and can result in being fatal. There are many health risks that obesity poses, the significant ones include atherosclerosis, hypertension, diabetes mellitus etc.; many of these health risks culminate into multi-system failures. Obesity can lead to personality crisis which is further increasing the rate of suicides. Most cases of suicides are seen amongst teenagers (Johsnson, 2009). Technology has been helping us through a lot of its benefits but its taking away a lot more than what it’s giving to us. There are some steps taken by some of the companies in order to make its players more active and indulge them in making use of their time. These steps do not lead the players to being lazy; these games actually refresh them and make them active physically and mentally. A new game that has been introduced lately is “Wii” – this game involves total physical activity of the player. Seeing an opportunity, video game cooperation Nintendo has developed an entertainment system which consists of both a social gathering and physical activity. Thanks to the digital artists who thought of it since it counteracts some of the negativities of videogames. The Nintendo Wii consists of a camera and a wireless remote. Movement is picked up by the remote and interpreted onto the screen. Games for the Wii are developed for constant exercise; this concept caters to the users who wish to lose weight with the expense of a gym. It also records ones weight and then gives you a detailed chart of the amount of calories you need to lose. Another very interesting invention is the “dancing mat”. The mat consists of 9 pads each having a direction on it. A video of a dancing character is played on the screen and the player must match the dance step of the on-screen character. This leads to exercise yet in an interesting manner increasing physical fitness. Fraud has not been new to the technological world. Computer auditing systems and tools have been used for decades to scrutinize and find out any fraudulent behavior however, can technology enable auditors to predict and hence stop fraud before it actually takes place. Though it may sound like science fiction but a start-up company from UK says that is possible. It says that artificial intelligence techniques can do just that (Bishop & Hydoski, 2009). A London based software company by the name of Future Route has gotten the commercial rights to exploit a technology known commonly as inductive logic programming. Inductive logic programming is actually a branch within artificial intelligence (Howard, 2009). It consists of devising methods for software to actually learn from its experience and also extracts knowledge from a large pool of protocol references in its database. This is how in Oxford University’s computing labs this software was given what the world knows today as artificial intelligence. The University has a society dedicated to artificial intelligence. This software is thought to be intelligent like humans since it is expected that it will gain from bad experiences and will be able to predict fraud without even encountering it in the first place. Future Route has made sure that inductive logic programming figures out all suspicious patterns in data that come to the companies. This data may be employee profiles, money transactions or any other data. The question arises where inductive logic programming gets its clues from. Quite obviously, this software gets its hints from common experiences and common flaws and tactics (Feenberg, 1999). For example, to locate a robber, a bloodhound is given the sniff of the robber’s socks so as to look for him. Such common techniques which involve common flaws and faults are fed in the software as the limiting conditions. Also, this software is expected to detect frauds of companies that have never been registered before (Lessig, 2002). This will be truly an achievement for inductive logic programming. Thus inductive logic programming has given a new dimension to fraud detection. It is a new technology that will cater to counter any technological faults and setbacks. It is hope that this will be a stepping stone to develop a system which adapts against any type of fraud. In the last decade all technology related fraud occurred easily. That was because there were no reliable fraud detection techniques. However, we have sufficiently reliable techniques to detect fraud today. Mostly deductive reasoning and newer technology with tighter security conditions are now being used to detect fraud (Brancik, 2007). This technique is called strategic fraud detection. Fraud detection has become an extremely important concept for managers of organizations to internal and external auditors and furthermore to the regulators. Recently, fraud has been prevented on the edge at organizations like Enron, World Com, Heath South and Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Bainbridge, 2007). A fraud of merely one dollar against an organization reduces the net income by one dollar and since organizations have a profit margin of ten to twenty percent, additional revenue accounting to ten times the amount of fraud must be generated to restore the net income to the pre-fraud level (Coderre, 2009). Hence, a one dollar fraud can not be neglected as being ordinary. A few years ago a major automobile manufacturing company had a loss of just $436 owing to fraud. At that time the company’s profit was around ten percent and it had to generate approximately 4.36 billion dollars to bring the net income to the level it had been before the fraud. If this fraud would have been detected earlier, the fraud loss would have been much smaller and it would have affected the company to a much lesser extent. The company had to make 218000 additional sales to restore its previous level of national income (Coenen). This shows how severe and how common fraud is today. Fraud, if detected before time can lead to much more severity and in extreme cases, a permanent loss (Hughes, 2005). People have been striving over time to protect themselves from frauds and other technological traps. Several decades ago, the company Deloitte and Touche, conducted a research on the use of statistical methods to focus specifically on abnormal data (Wells, 2008). They came up with the concept called the Statistical Techniques for Analytical Review (STAR). These pointed out the fluctuations in data that warranted further information (Coderre, 2009). STAR proved to be such a useful product that it was integrated in the auditing system. Thus we can easily conclude that technology, despite being the greatest blessing in today’s world it is also the biggest fear for us. On one side, it can make our lives much simpler and easier but on the other hand, it has the capability of destroying all that we have. Where technology can construct, it can also destruct (Casey, 2001). Fraud and other negative impacts of technology have emerged since the invention of computers and have been halting our progress and deteriorating our present condition (Coenen). Today, with means such as artificial intelligence, fraud and other negativities can be prevented before they destruct us completely. Technology, used destructively, will harm everyone, even those who temporarily gain from it. We have seen the brighter side of technology and its darker side too; it is now upon us to find out which side we want for ourselves. For budding entrepreneurs, it is extremely essential that they review the laws very carefully before plunging in to business. Fraud is a common thing in businesses and to save from it entrepreneurs should have a sufficient know how of the country’s rules and policies on issues like credit card forging, trademarks and copyrights etc (Vona, 2008). This is important to save them from any calamities that may arise due to lack of knowledge. 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Wilson, D., Patterson, A., Powell, G. & Hembury, R., 2006. Fraud and Technology Crimes. [Online] (Updated September 2006)Available from: http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs06/rdsolr0906.pdf [Accessed 11 June 2010]. Read More