Technology: part blessing, bigger part curse

I think I’ve made a major discovery.
Then again, I’m sure some tattered cardigan wearing PhD candidate from Yale thought of it first and wrote a few books about it 50 years ago, alas, I’ve not read those books and I don’t care what he thinks.
Therefore, in keeping with academic tradition, I’m going to go ahead and take full credit for this new revelation.
I’ve read about evolution, studied it in school and used it to describe people with a less-than-forward thinking approach to life (read: fundy Christians). Descent with modification and survival of the organism most able to adapt to their surroundings is the fairly broad definition used for an immensely complicated topic.
I’m also a strong proponent of technology and all of the paths by which it makes humanity stronger and more adept at handling the increasing number of challenges we encounter on a daily basis. Technology continues to churn out wonderful ideas and tools to help boost the enlightenment of our species.
Except robots. I hate robots. I’ll touch on that later.
Unfortunately, beneath that adoration I’ve come to the realization that technology is actually making us dumber, fatter and lazier as a populace.
As a nation, we excel at finding ways to avoid actually engaging our bodies in a variety of simple tasks that even our parents would do without thinking twice. Instead of walking, we take a bicycle. Or even worse, we hop in our car to drive two blocks.
Instead of having to track down our food in the plains or the jungles, we head to the dull linoleum aisles of Albertsons or Costco. Or we take the most egregious of lazy culinary roads and pay extra to have it dropped off at our front door so that we don’t have to venture out into that appalling Southern California weather.
Reading, writing or scouring the library to finish a paper or edify yourself is no longer a necessary task. Now we just sit in front of our God Box and beg Google to give us all the answers.
Kind of like I’m doing right now.
Actually reading the material and absorbing its contents has been pushed aside for search boxes and the ever popular “For Dummies” series of books aimed at those that want to educate themselves on a subject, but want to exert the least amount of effort as possible to achieve it.
I’m sure we’re only about 25 years away from the robots taking over the planet and putting us to work as batteries like in “The Matrix.”
Technology is there to help our lives, not run them. It’s quickly becoming a crutch, and we’re beginning to require it just to walk upright. Which begs the question “Just how far are we are from de-evolution?”
So just try to take a second each day to look around, stop being a lethargic layabout and do something constructive so that we can hold off the Robot Tyranny for a few more years.
See, told you. It’s always comes down to the robots.