In this paper our focus would be on impact of technology on human Productivity and human living standards. We must first define the technology and its different aspects, than we will take a glimpse of its impact on the aforesaid issues. Technology engages the management of the atmosphere to satisfy individuals’ basic necessities for example food, protection, communication, and healthiness and than its wants and desires. No doubt it is true that the technological developments form the last 10,000 years of mankind history, has affected and affected by the environment, science and human societies.
The industrial revolution was an example to understand the deep impact of technology on human life. This revolution was resulted due to intensive technological progressions. The inventions of the industrialization era such as the electricity, steam engine, development in the field of medicine, telephone, resulted due to technological progressions. This eventually leads to upgrade the living standards and human productivity.
As this paper is dedicates to technology and its impact on productivity and living standards, so we should start from the world technology.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word technology refers to “scientific knowledge that deals with methods of doing things. It is the application of science to a practical use mainly for industrial use. It is constituted by the technological skills, means and characteristics of a group, period, organization or country”. (Technology definition Dictionary.com)
The humanity has taken benefits from enormous transformations in the quality of life due to technological breakthroughs. The progression in technology has resulted in the accretion of scientific awareness over an epoch and consequently knowledge became the source of change in productivity, production processes and consequently human living standards. It has principally altered the world and will keep on doing so. (Balunywa, 1-10)
According to historians, technology advances by the stages together with observation, sighting, growth, probability and production. The innovation and surveillance phases are phases through which methodical acquaintance is originated. As some developing countries are not been the key players in the innovation and surveillance phases that’s why they lag behind on accretion of acquaintance about which further technologies have developed. Where it has adopted a technology, it has gone in largely at the production stage. (Balunywa, 1-10)
Benefits of Technology:
As technology has evolved the mode living standards and working environment. It is the key source of change in this material world. It gives us variety of novel products from a baked cake in fully hygienic conditions to note book computers. It facilitates the individuals to reclaimed natural world to give them such tools so as to crack the globe. It facilitates the individuals to travel from a place to other with automobiles, airplanes, and other approaches of transportation. Technology makes it possible for individuals to travel around the planet and search intended for resources and life around the globe on other planets. Technology makes it possible to be in touch through Satellite, Internet, Fax and phone. Information Technology further revolutionized the world. Mankind recreates circumstances as a result to do which was not probable earlier, such as in the case of Location of industry. Now it is achievable to place an industry in regions where it was not likely to have. Opportunities are created due to technology. (Turcotte and Rennison, 25-30)
All of this eventually increases the efficiency and more importantly the effectiveness of individuals and organizations. It thus resulted in the shape of improved productivity, novel usage of previous products, enhanced and better procedures, and rapid methodology of doing things. It reduces the time to generate products (efficiency) and reduced cost of production (effectivity). (Turcotte and Rennison, 25-30)
To be with technological changes is now main priority of organizations for their survival and adaptation of technology proportionate in the midst of organizational needs. In developed countries where technology is on its boom the consequences are astonishing. Those developed societies have high ranks of living standards with longer life and a diversity of up to date gadgets to make their life easier. (Turcotte and Rennison, 25-30)
A development in any field of life is based on the best utilization of scarce resources. Technology helps the mankind to use their scarce resources efficiently, Technology leads towards improvement, it formulate that how cost of production can be lowest and increase the productivity and intensification. It’s due to technology that human beings live longer and life became more and more easy. Beyond doubt it will transform the lives of individuals but technology on its hold has no significance. To exploit technology there is a dire need to have a strong leadership with a supportive economic atmosphere and good policies.
Information technology is presently captivating middle step. The vast returns it has in reduction to the release in rank about the world, as well as the center position of information in the global economy, it means that information technology will form the changes of the new century.
A well-liked hypothesis and clarification of the modern modifications happening around us is that the mankind is in the middle of a third chief revolution in human beings society. From stone ages if we observe that the first was the Agricultural Revolution, then the Industrial Revolution, and presently it is the Information Revolution. It’s all due to technological changes. Still are we in the middle of a radical revolutionary jump? Are we considering and existing from side to side a nonstop or an irregular change in human beings society? And still the current age symbolized a basic change, whether the go up of information technology and all its linked belongings to the input dimension of alteration in this basic communal alteration? These different kinds of technologies and a global structure of information swap has been edifice increase for in excess of a hundred years and corporeal technology and industry is not sluggish downward in growth – rather it is step up.
It would be suggested that civilization is, in reality, changing in an original way, but the Information technology is just an element of a further wide-ranging occurrence connecting manifold and mutually dependent roots, counting ways of life, human values, science, culture, economy and politics. This technological change is producing disorder, turbulence, plentiful communal harms and a restructuring of human beings life. Society, economy, religion, education, science, psychology and skill are all altering, since they are all equally consistent.
Today, all major persisting technologies, including the information technology (IT) have a vital position in a modern society. It has distorted the entire world into a worldwide village with a global economy, which is more and more dependent relatively on the artistic management and sharing of information. Globalization of world economies has very much improved the principles of information to commerce organizations and has obtainable new trade opportunities. Nowadays, the information technology offers the statement and logical authority that association need for perform trade and running industry at universal stage with much easiness. To organize their international system of dealers, consumers, distributors and organizations which have urbanized worldwide information schemes that can track deliveries, orders and expenses round the timepiece. It is probable since of the expansion of information technology in its present form. (Turcotte and Rennison, 25-30)
Its impact on Productivity and living standards:
It is beyond doubt that social changes may occur due to technological changes. Progress in technology, is usually not justifiably joint within civilizations. Those who have money, have more prospects to acquire modern technologies, which makes them to collect more wealth. It is also notify able keep in mind that conflict has been and will carry on to be the heavy strength for knowledge and novelty. Technology directs to superior social economic distribution. The industrial upheavals we observe suggest that technology worn to the disadvantage to the society.
Presently the internet is a major source of free exchange of information by using technology, loose by any administration. In its uncooked shape it was the playing field of hackers and computer geeks. This carried a new-fangled age, the technological upheaval. This liberated stream of information carried technological progress with an unparalleled pace and made many people wealthy. Trade through internet influence the common man in a society and let him to trade with consumer directly, which brings efficiency with lower prices and competition, it is truer that this efficiency brings more wealth for shareholders, as well as management of the organizations. The built-in interlace of social connections to do business, can be unscrambled and complete it into a straight supply-chain. These new trends of commerce are creating more effectivity and efficiencies which take away the need for lengthy procedures of supply chain on the expense of social interactions.
Opposing the surge of technological transform is not viable. Now its impossible to do a business without a website or an electronic mail or a fax machine or a mobile phone. People have do business well before these inventions. But now, there is more competition, and impossible without technology. It can guide to estrangement if it is not extensively detached in society. It has prepared the progressive world more richer position but with a disadvantage of the atmosphere. Machinery has permitted individual to shift from physical work, consequently that now in Australia there are 85,000 farmers and 100,000 accountants. This eventually showed that technology has departed too distant, and there are more individuals to count beans than sowing them. (The Social Impact of Technology, 1)
Individuals who have beliefs that technological progress to raise productivity has to query their suppositions (i) that this technological progress is really the progress plus (ii) whether productivity is in fact a goal worthwhile to achieve. One of the frequently unnoticed problems is the level towards which the quest of productivity hinders with the fair completion of essential psychosomatic needs for individual independence and a mental good judgment of the public. In the past these needs frequently caused fatality to excessively hopeful technological excitement, and the present mechanization of civilization is subsequent to the chronological way. In civilizations away from insufficiency, productivity in favor of its personal needs be supposed to not simply be discarded like the key objective; it has to be discarded as an objective on each and every one because of its contradiction with self-sufficiency and society.
The common skepticism from different researchers that, whether the present era assure us about the delivery of the nuclear diligence that the resultant domestic unit electricity would be “too economical to gauge.” However in spite of our past of speculating incorrect, we this time again has been recommended by every side to have belief in the eventual technological treatment intended for whatsoever suffered us: the age of computer, by its laptops as well as desk-top computers and robotic industrial units, its pace and effectiveness, determine the workers productivity, better schooling of our children with more success, abolish intense labor, fetch out better democratic system, The future is finally here, and even though the Steam Age didn’t quite live up to its promise.
Here, two assumptions arise in relation to the argument that technological developments connected to the beginning of computers at place of work will add to productivity. The first assumption is that the technological progress is no doubt “progress,” and the second assumption is that productivity is at all times a valuable key objective. Unluckily, one major problem which should not be ignored is the level in the direction of which the ambitious quest of productivity is in fact hinders to the completion of the societal and psychosomatic needs of persons. It is indeed that technological developments might enhance our productivity and make it more cost effective or makes the material life more comfortable. But here a question appears that at what cost? What would be the meaning of, when one can argue that the productivity is one of most important goals? Whether it’s something which is good or a key importance for its self purpose, at the similar point as happiness, freedom or friendship?
Some researchers suggested adding psychological needs during the measurement of productivity and it must include the well being of mankind. Even though there is no such generally established accounting to measure such psychological needs, But generally two broad kinds of needs have acceptance first the need for individual independence and the other one is the need to have a psychological wisdom of society (“spiritual union”). Individual independence and a psychological wisdom of society are both hard to attain even in the developed civilizations, and as the both of these needs are contradictory to each other, so it’s difficult to achieve both at the same time. It is important that we should learn to put on material accretion, it is not necessary that the computer’s assure to increase our productivity—which sometimes meant to get extra things at lower cost.
Technology at all times has wider impacts than planned, and as individuals are enforced to become accustomed to yet further prevailing and proficient technology, fundamental communal and psychosomatic needs are persistently discharged as extra at the given name of progress.
It may be clearer with the example of the work being conducted by psychologists to produce an electronic device considered to check the mind waves of workers in high-risk professions, “to know whether persons are focusing on their work and performing at suitable mind intensities”. The use of programmed head covering, by means of fixed electrodes by the Westinghouse, has the purpose to assist organizations remain flaps on carelessness of the workers. Without any doubt the system will finally broaden right through the labor force. This kind of technological developments cut through the employee independence and solitude at the name of productivity.
Technological progress for the sake of increased productivity may be acceptable if the productivity of individuals would be the eventual objective. In societies full of resources, though, productivity in itself be supposed to not only be discarded as the prime objective, it must be discarded as an objective at all time when it contradicts with independence and society. In a culture that educate us that every problem should be answered through money, that larger productivity and additional material product can interchange for an absent mind of kindness and friendship, for independence and creativeness, this type of society may be “creative” in the representative economic sagacity though it makes a lot of citizens whose living is in fact unfruitful when considered on any kind of human scale. There is a need of value solutions not technological solutions, such type of solutions that let for better independence and society relatively than answers that purely suggest us further of what has been rambling in the history. (Fox, n.p.)
Technological development reasoned social, political and ecological alterations. Development of technology and changes in history has a direct correlation. Technology permits the individuals to overcome their world, which causes the evolution of ideas, cultures, physical landscapes and people, are shattered. It allows the captors to succeed and turn out to be further flourishing inside their own civilization.
Technology has greater impact on society and human development through the formulation of Information Technology Strategies. It looks for, to reduce the obtainable break among interest holders and plan supervision by providing these interest holders with gears and abilities to add to or direct the procedure of rising technological strategies and provided that expert and technicians an essential insight into human development and a method to produce applicable societal impact as of their effort. It will produce an ordinary language for improved message with agenda supervision. (Levy, n.p.)
Possibly one of the misfortunes at this instance is the delayed appreciation of the significance of knowledge in the interaction with man. Technology has been and carried on to be an influential power in the social order. It has misrepresented the method of how individuals live, how they think regarding themselves and others, and his insight of the upcoming. We are finding out that nonstop progress of technology has carried out slight, growing, and persistent modifications in the ordinary and societal atmosphere. It is this modification that will strengthen reassessment of the assignment of edification, as well as industrial technology. The vital difficulty at this time and the matter which ought to contain the supreme impact on living standards is a look for other technologies which convene the requirements of mankind and improve the excellence of life in all its magnitude. The problem should be documented as first and foremost societal and not technological, needs suitable societal gears to allow mankind to attain the objective of a humanitarian society gathering human beings needs and purposes. (DeVore et al, n.p.)
Technology is awareness. For the development of this awareness, there is a dire need to make people aware, to transform the way how to live and compose it as more adjustable to the atmosphere.
Works Cited
- Carlos Miranda Levy, Social Impact from Technology Digital Vision Fellowship, November 25, 2005
- http://fellows.rdvp.org/sift Accessed October 31, 2008
- Best Practices of Technology Integration, Title: The Evolution of Technology, Subject Area: Global Studies/ World History, Intended Grade Level: 9th
- Dennis R. Fox, Technology, Productivity, and Psychological Needs. Vol. 43, P. 179-214, 1996 (1986)
- DeVore, Paul W, McCrory, David L. Technology Education Teacher Center. (1975)
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- Julie Turcotte and Lori Whewell Rennison Finance Canada
- Information Technology and Productivity: A Review of the Literature Erik Brynjolfsson Shinkyu, P.25-30, 2001.
- Julie Turcotte, Lori Whewell Rennison. The Link between Technology Use, Human Capital, Productivity and Wages: Firm-level Evidence. P. 25-36, 2004
- http://www.csls.ca/ipm/9/turcotte_rennison-e.pdf Accessed October 31, 2008
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