Reading Response 1—Cautious cars and cantankerous kitchens

“Our lives are transformed both for good and for bad. This is good when the devices work as promised—and bad when they fail or when they transform productive, creative people into servants continually looking after their machines, getting them out of trouble , repairing them, and maintaining them (P16). ”

“In many cases, they (machines) will make our lives more effective, more fun, and safer. In others, however, they will frustrate us, get in our way, and even increase dangers (p34).”

Most probably, not only Norman has these concerns, but experts, even ordinary people who are interest in the relationship between human beings and technology, could not help considering the issues aroused by technology. The contradiction is just like a coin has two sides.

Once again, it reminds me of the movie Wall-E. I want to insert my critical ideas into it, which would make it more vivid and understandable. Apart from the theme of affirmative character from Wall-E, the movie also reflects a critical issue on the relationship between humans and technology. You might still remember that in the movie, all of the humans, who evacuated Earth 700 years earlier, lived in a large space cruise ship, which was far away from the earth. In the ship, everything is high-tech driven. Machines and robots with various functions are around everywhere. Humans do not need to do things, as hi-tech replaces humans to do them successfully. The people of Earth only ride around this space resort on hovering chairs which give them a constant feed of TV and video chatting. They drink all of their meals through a straw out of laziness and bone loss. Thoroughly depending on the hovering chairs, both adults and kids are so fat that they can barely move and do not know how to walk any longer. I have to admit that the labors are really free due to hi-tech. With these hi-tech, humans are indeed served very well. However, it seems the legs with humans are redundant, face-to-face communication is useless; furthermore, it seems humans cannot live without technology and the world is disordered if something is wrong with a tiny machine part. By watching this scene, I began to doubt if it is the dream world that humans have been struggling for in the hundreds of years.                 

More ironically, the auto-pilot computer in the captain’s office, which was designed to be controlled by the captain of the ship, prevents the people from returning and fights with the captain when the captain tries to command it to return back to the earth. Although there is still a good ending in the movie that people finally return back to the earth, I cannot stop thinking that how we should develop the advance tools that serve us very well, and to what extent we should develop them. Otherwise, they become the obstacles that all of us are not willing to accept it, just as Norman mentioned that “They (machines) will frustrate us, get in our way, and even increase dangers (P34).”

Do the machines or robots make humans redundant? No! It is the humans not the machines or robots who make themselves redundant. When I ponder much further, I realize that this movie actually doesn't demonize technology. It only argues that technology should be properly used to help humans cultivate their true nature – that it must be subordinate to human flourishing, and help move that along.

Likewise, I don’t want to demonize technology. On the contrary, I am looking forward to the smooth interaction between people and those intelligent devices. And, the key to achieve it is, I think Norman has already given us the answer, “we must design our technologies for the way people actually behave, not the way we would like them to behave (p12).” Hopefully, a graceful symbiosis of people and technology will become highly true in 700 years, which the movie Wall-E has shown to us---humans and robots are working alongside each other to renew the Earth during the end credits.