The author’s concept of feedback makes the interpretation of machinery and technology a more inviting concept. Feedback is generally associated with a proactive intention for better something. This approach seems contradicting to his original published comment on “the modern industrial revolution is bound to devalue the human brain.” This written statement of his seemed to enable technology at the expense of people’s lives rather than a service.
Why is it that people may assume the usage of technology is the replacement of human capacities instead of the advancement and amplification of human achievement. After this reading, I began to gather a theory that the sense of authority/ control technology now has embedded into it, allowing people to think there is no need to assert their control of a process because the machine takes care of it all. Are we becoming more hands free? The reading goes into depth of how the control(capabilities) a machine has occurs through the process of “sending messages which effectively change the behavior of the recipient.” Technology becomes a response and/or translation system for a multitude of tasks.
These translated systems machines create to an extent have created a widening gap of loss of information between the user and the outcome. And an example of this could be when a student uses a calculator for a math problem. Before calculators were accessible mathematical problems were solved entirely by hand. So give a student a graphing calculator to solve a problem, they’ll ideally solve it correctly. Now give them a similar problem and remove the graphing calculator, will they be able to solve the problem? Will it take them longer to solve the problem? Will they reference the process of the calculator to solve the problem or will they have relied so much on the technology that they have a gap in their knowledge of solving the problem?
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