Return to primitive. Scientific and technological revolution

Progress

Why do we need progress, all these technological novelties that flood the market, the obsolescence of some technologies and their transformation into new ones? Today in stores they advertise another phone with various functions - tomorrow it will be outdated, and this company has released a new one, already with other functions. The necessity of these innovations is doubtful, of course. Why is progress needed? The answer is simple - progress is needed for a certain number of people, owners of corporations, in order to make a profit, to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of the people -. Well, after all, judge for yourself, well, is it really necessary for a person to have all these things? Can't a person live without them? And what, during the times, for example, the Middle Ages, people did not live, or what?

Humanity is trying to come up with more and more comfortable conditions. Ideally, it looks like this: a person sits on the couch, watches TV, the robot switches the channel, another robot feeds him with a spoon, etc. Man has become nothing but a vegetable, which is no longer able to do anything with his own hands. Generation after generation, people forget all their skills, and in the end they will no longer be able to provide for themselves, by analogy with the disabled. Only people become disabled due to misfortune, and then people themselves will drive themselves into this.

This addiction is becoming more and more incurable. The more a person puts himself on this needle, the harder it will be for him to get off it. First he started using a harmless electric kettle, then a microwave oven, then a food processor, and so on. As a result, he was up to his neck in this quagmire of consumption.

This craving for such comfort is usually motivated as follows: "I get tired at work and when I come home, I simply don’t have the strength to do something. I want to provide myself with maximum comfort." To which you can answer like this: “Where do you work? Do you mine ore in a mine? Or do you unload wagons? Maybe just change jobs so as not to get tired like that? if you don’t get so tired, then you won’t need this comfort, because you will still have strength. more comfortable conditions.

Such people do not even realize that they are addicts, by analogy with drug addiction. After all, many drug addicts or alcoholics, if you ask: do you consider yourself as such? What will they answer? No, of course we don't! And this is only if it is already the last stage, they can admit it. It is the same here, do you consider yourself dependent on this comfort imposed by advertisers? "No, we don't," they say. Don't believe? You can ask them yourself! If you give them good arguments, they still won't help change their minds. A protective reaction will turn on in the brain, as if blocking. Because to understand it - you need to think carefully. This understanding comes with time, but not immediately.

So, let's summarize the progress. Why does humanity need progress? Why not. He doesn't need him. Progress is a by-product of science. I think it would be nice if he stopped his growth - and people spent this energy on something more useful. For example, to rake up the garbage after this progress, to plant cut down forests, to clean rivers and lakes from waste. Restore ecosystems. Lots of work.

Primitivism (Anarcho-primitivism)

Primitivism is essentially a harsh critique of progress. He denies progress as such. Calls for the abolition of technology, deindustrialization. The transition from civilization to primitive forms of life.

Of course, primitivism may seem extreme, but the very essence of it, I think, is worth adopting. It is not necessary to destroy everything that was invented earlier. It is enough just to stop the growing progress, and, therefore, the growing consumption. And the whole marketing system in general.

Well, did people at the time, for example, Socrates, live unhappily without those things that the market is teeming with now? Yeah well, drop it! They were born, grew up, studied, fell in love, got married, raised children and died in the end. These new things of yours will not give you anything supernatural. You will still die! Sooner or later, like me and everyone else. If we understand that we don't really need this growing progress, but only a small number of people who get huge money from us fools, then maybe we can stop it. After all, demand creates supply! Demand is artificially created...

Scientific and technological progress (NTP)- this is a process of interconnected, progressive development of science and technology, due to the needs of material production, the growth and complexity of the needs of society. This process began to be discussed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. in connection with the strengthening of the relationship between the development of large-scale machine production and science and technology. This interrelation gave rise to the contradictions of the NTP. The contradictions immediately affected both the technical and the social side of social development. Therefore, in economic science, the contradictions of scientific and technological progress are usually divided into technical and social. The mass production of the same products for many years makes it possible to create expensive automatic machine systems. This is due to the fact that over the long service life of the equipment, all costs are easily recouped. The accelerated pace of scientific and technical progress requires continuous improvement of the production facilities themselves, forcing them to either modernize or completely replace manufactured products. This is where the contradiction in the development of technology manifests itself - the contradiction between the service life and the payback period, or the technical contradiction of scientific and technological progress. The social contradictions of scientific and technical progress are connected with the human factor: on the one hand, technical innovations should facilitate working conditions, and on the other hand, they provoke monotony, monotony, since they are based on automated processes, conveyor production. The resolution of these contradictions is directly related to the increasing requirements for scientific and technological progress. These requirements are embodied in the social order. Social order - a form of expression of the strategic interests of society in the long term in the field of scientific and technical progress.

48. The main directions of scientific and technological progress.

The main directions of scientific and technical progress and the development of science and technology are aimed at solving the most pressing problems facing society, which are to improve living standards, meet growing needs, ensure security and economic growth. Only the policy of increasing the effectiveness of scientific and technical progress, its deeper penetration into the most important areas of human activity and the reasonable use of the achievements of science and technology can solve many problems of modern society.

The main directions of scientific and technical progress - scientific and technological progress- these are such areas of development of science and technology, the implementation of which in practice will provide maximum economic and social efficiency in the shortest possible time.

Distinguish:

nationwide (general),

branch (private) areas of scientific and technical progress.

In economics, it is customary to distinguish between the main directions of scientific and technical progress and the forms of their manifestation.

These include the following areas:

electrification of the national economy;

complex mechanization and automation of production;

chemicalization of production;

introduction of the latest technologies.

49. Economic and social efficiency of scientific and technological progress.

NTP- this is a continuous process of introducing new equipment and technology, organizing production and labor based on the achievements of scientific knowledge.

It is characterized by the following features:

development and widespread use of fundamentally new machines and machine systems,

working in automatic mode;

creation and development of qualitatively new production technologies;

discovery and use of new types and sources of energy;

creation and widespread use of new types of materials with predetermined properties;

wide development of automation of production processes based on the use of machine tools

with numerical control, automatic lines, industrial robots,

flexible production systems;

introduction of new forms of organization of labor and production.

At the present stage, the following features of scientific and technical progress are observed: There is an increase in the technological orientation of scientific and technological progress, its technological component. Progressive technologies are now the main link in scientific and technical progress both in terms of the scale of implementation and in terms of results.

There is an intensification of scientific and technical progress: the volume of scientific knowledge is growing, the qualitative composition of scientific personnel is improving, the cost effectiveness of its implementation is growing, and the effectiveness of scientific and technological progress is increasing.

At the present stage, scientific and technical progress is becoming more and more complex, systemic. This is expressed, first of all, in the fact that scientific and technical progress now covers all sectors of the economy, including the service sector, penetrates into all elements of social production: the material and technical base, the process of organizing production, the process of training personnel and the organization of management. In quantitative terms, complexity is also manifested in the mass introduction of scientific and technological achievements.

An important regularity of scientific and technical progress is the strengthening of its resource-saving orientation. As a result of the introduction of scientific and technological achievements, material, technical and labor resources are saved, and this is an important criterion for the effectiveness of scientific and technological progress.

There is an increase in the social orientation of STP, which is manifested in the increasing impact of STP on the social factors of human life: the conditions of work, study, life.

There is an increasing trend in the development of science and technology to preserve the environment - the greening of scientific and technological progress. This is the development and application of low-waste and waste-free technologies, the introduction of effective methods for the integrated use and processing of natural resources, and a more complete involvement in the economic circulation of production and consumption waste.

To ensure the effective functioning of the economy, it is necessary to pursue a unified state scientific and technical policy. To do this, priority areas for the development of science and technology should be chosen at each stage of planning.

The main directions of scientific and technological progress are electrification, complex mechanization, automation of production and chemicalization of production.

Electrification is the process of widespread introduction of electricity into social production and life. It is the basis for mechanization and automation, as well as chemicalization of production.

Integrated mechanization and automation of production is the process of replacing manual labor with a system of machines, apparatus, and instruments in all areas of production. This process is accompanied by a transition from low to higher forms, that is, from manual labor to partial, small and complex mechanization and further to the highest form of mechanization - automation.

Chemicalization of production- the process of production and application of chemical materials, as well as the introduction of chemical methods and processes into technology.

The priority areas of scientific and technical progress at the present stage are: biotechnology, electronization of the national economy, integrated automation, accelerated development of nuclear energy, creation and implementation of new materials, development of fundamentally new technologies.

NTP allows you to solve the following problems: firstly, it is NTP that is the main means of increasing labor productivity, reducing production costs, increasing output and improving its quality. Secondly, as a result of scientific and technical progress, new efficient machines, materials, and technological processes are created that improve working conditions and reduce the labor intensity of manufacturing products. Thirdly, scientific and technical progress has a strong impact on the organization of production, stimulates the growth of the concentration of production, accelerates the development of its specialization and cooperation. Fourthly, the progress of science and technology ensures the solution of socio-economic problems (employment of the population, lightening of labor, etc.), serves to better satisfy the needs of both society as a whole and each person. Efficiency of scientific and technical progress

The result of the implementation of the achievements of scientific and technological progress is an increase in the efficiency of the functioning of the national economy.

The effectiveness of scientific and technical progress is understood as the ratio of the effect and the costs that caused this effect. The effect is understood as a positive result, which is obtained as a result of the implementation of the achievements of scientific and technical progress.

The effect can be:

economic (reduction in production costs, profit growth, labor productivity growth, and so on);

political (ensuring economic independence, strengthening defense capability);

social (improving working conditions, raising the material and cultural level of citizens, and so on);

environmental (reduction of environmental pollution).

When determining economic efficiency in the implementation of the achievements of scientific and technical progress, one-time and current costs are distinguished. One-time costs are capital investments for the creation of new technology. Current costs are costs that are incurred during the entire life of the new equipment.

Distinguish between absolute and comparative economic efficiency. Absolute economic efficiency is defined as the ratio of the economic effect to the total amount of capital investments that caused this effect. For the national economy as a whole, absolute economic efficiency (Ee.ef.n / x) is defined as follows:

Ee.ef.n / x \u003d DD / K

where DD is the annual increase in national income, rubles; K - capital investments that caused this increase, rub.

Comparative economic efficiency.

Calculations of comparative economic efficiency are used when choosing options for capital construction, reconstruction and technical re-equipment of enterprises, technological processes, structures, and so on. Comparison of various options for solving economic and technical problems is carried out using a system of basic and additional indicators.

The modern world has been formed in a number of factors, the main of which is scientific and technological progress (STP). The main features of the modern world are determined by scientific and technical progress. Scientific and technological progress is the basis of modern civilization. He is only 300-350 years old. It was then that industrial civilization arose. STP permeates the entire civilization (activities, people's lives). NTP is a twofold thing: it has both positive and negative features. Positive - improvement of comfort, negative - ecological (comfort leads to an ecological crisis) and cultural (due to the development of means of communication, there is no need for direct contact).

Scientific and technological progress (STP) is a process of constant renewal of all elements of reproduction, the main place in which belongs to the renewal of technology and technology. This question is eternal and constant, as is the eternal and constant work of human thought, designed to facilitate and reduce the cost of human and mental labor to achieve the final result in labor activity.

At the same time, almost half a century of development of the world economy under the conditions of scientific and technological progress makes it possible to identify a number of its specific features, an objective assessment of which can contribute to the practical extraction of the huge opportunities potentially inherent in scientific and technological progress for economic and social progress. The main features of the NTP include:

- accelerating the pace of scientific and technological progress;
- complication and absolute rise in price of new technologies;
- Significant changes in the structure of employment and qualitative characteristics of the labor force.

The rate of scientific and technical progress means the period from fundamental research or the emergence of a new scientific and technical idea to its implementation in production and obtaining an effective effect.

The acceleration of the pace of scientific and technical progress at its present stage determines the economic behavior of the entrepreneur, forcing him to reduce the time frame for new capital construction to the maximum. With their lengthening, a new scientific and technical solution may appear, which may necessitate reconstruction even before the commissioning of a new capital facility.

The scientific and technical achievements of the NTP era are much more effective than the achievements of the previous stage. The acceleration of the pace of scientific and technical progress, the complication and rise in the cost of scientific and technological achievements of scientific and technical progress made high demands on the quality characteristics of the workforce.

The advent of scientific and technical progress presented completely new requirements for the knowledge and skills of workers. The development and use of rapidly changing machinery and technology require a new level of education, qualifications, general professional knowledge and culture in the interests of production.

But, despite the positive features, some global problems of mankind are associated with scientific and technical progress:

1) the problem of overpopulation. In the 40s and 50s there was an active invention of new drugs (for example, among them a class of antibiotic drugs), which was the success of a whole spectrum of sciences, from biology to chemistry. Around the same time, new ways of industrial production of vaccines and drugs were proposed, making many drugs cheap and available. Thanks to these successes of scientific and technical progress in the field of medicine, such terrible diseases as tetanus, poliomyelitis and anthrax have receded, and the incidence of tuberculosis and leprosy has significantly decreased. After the Second World War, in many countries of Asia and Africa, young independent states began to introduce medical care. Massive cheap vaccinations and the introduction of elementary hygiene rules led to a sharp increase in life expectancy and a decrease in mortality.
2) environmental problems associated with an unlimited growth in production and emissions of harmful substances into the atmosphere, deforestation and landscape transformation, an increase in the number of cars, active shipping and air travel.
3) problems associated with new types of weapons.

In its development, scientific and technical progress manifests itself in two interrelated and interdependent forms - evolutionary and revolutionary.

The evolutionary form of scientific and technical progress is characterized by a gradual, continuous improvement of traditional technical means and technologies, the accumulation of these improvements. Such a process can last quite a long time and provide, especially at its initial stages, significant economic results.

At a certain stage, there is an accumulation of technical improvements. On the one hand, they are no longer effective enough, on the other hand, they create the necessary basis for fundamental, fundamental transformations of the productive forces, which ensures the achievement of a qualitatively new social labor, higher productivity. A revolutionary situation arises. This form of development of scientific and technological progress is called revolutionary. Under the influence of the scientific and technological revolution, qualitative changes are taking place in the material and technical base of production.

Efficiency of NTP:

The result of the implementation of the achievements of scientific and technological progress is an increase in the efficiency of the functioning of the national economy.

The effect can be:

economic (reduction of production costs, profit growth, labor productivity growth, and so on);
political (ensuring economic independence, strengthening defense capabilities);
social (improving working conditions, raising the material and cultural level of citizens, and so on);
environmental (reduction of environmental pollution).

To ensure the effective functioning of the economy, it is necessary to pursue a unified state scientific and technical policy. A unified scientific and technical policy is a system of purposeful measures that ensure the comprehensive development of science and technology and the introduction of their results into the economy. This requires a choice of priorities in the development of science and technology and those industries in which scientific achievements should be implemented in the first place. This is also due to the limited resources of the state to conduct large-scale research in all areas of scientific and technical progress and their implementation in practice. Thus, the state at each stage of its development must determine the main directions of scientific and technical progress, provide conditions for their implementation.

At one time, the following areas of scientific and technological progress were identified as nationwide: electrification of the national economy; complex mechanization and automation of production; chemicalization of production. The most important, or decisive, of all these areas is electrification, since without it other areas of scientific and technological progress are inconceivable. It should be noted that for their time these were well-chosen areas of scientific and technical progress, which played a positive role in accelerating, developing and increasing the efficiency of production. They are also important at this stage in the development of social production, so we will dwell on them in more detail.

We have not learned how to protect ourselves from earthquakes and hurricanes, travel faster or live longer. But it's nothing...

The 21st century turned out to be completely different from the forecasts of fifty years ago. There are no intelligent robots, no flying cars, no cities on other planets. Worse, we are no closer to such a future. Instead, we have iPhone, Twitter and Google, but is this an adequate replacement? However, they still use the operating system that appeared in 1969.

More and more people are beginning to suspect that something is wrong. One gets the impression that technological progress, if not stopped, then at least failed. Frivolous gadgets change like clockwork every month, and significant problems, the solution of which seemed close and inevitable, are forgotten for some reason. Writer Neil Stevenson has tried to articulate these doubts in his article "Innovative Fasting":

“One of my first memories is sitting in front of a bulky black and white TV and watching one of the first American astronauts go into space. I saw the last launch of the last shuttle on a widescreen LCD panel when I was 51 years old. I have watched the space program decline with sadness, even bitterness. Where are the promised toroidal space stations? Where is my ticket to Mars? We are unable to repeat even the space achievements of the sixties. I'm afraid this indicates that society has forgotten how to cope with really difficult tasks.

Stevenson is echoed by Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and Facebook's first outside investor. An article he published in the National Review is bluntly titled "Future's End":

“Technological progress is clearly lagging behind the lofty hopes of the fifties and sixties, and this is happening on multiple fronts. Here is the most literal example of progress slowing down: our movement speed has stopped growing. The centuries-old history of ever-faster modes of transport, which began with sailboats in the 16th and 18th centuries, continued with the development of railways in the 19th century and the advent of automobiles and aviation in the 20th century, was reversed when the Concorde, the last supersonic aircraft, was scrapped in 2003. passenger plane. Against the background of such regression and stagnation, those who continue to dream of spaceships, vacations on the moon and sending astronauts to other planets of the solar system seem to be aliens themselves.

This is not the only argument in favor of the theory that technological progress is slowing down. Its supporters offer to look at least at computer technology. All fundamental ideas in this area are at least forty years old. Unix will be 45 years old in a year. SQL was invented in the early seventies. At the same time, the Internet, object-oriented programming and a graphical interface appeared.

In addition to examples, there are also numbers. Economists evaluate the impact of technological progress on the rate of growth in labor productivity and changes in the gross domestic product of countries where new technologies are being introduced. Changes in these indicators during the 20th century confirm that the suspicions of pessimists are not unfounded: growth rates have been falling for several decades.

In the United States, the impact of technological change on gross domestic product peaked in the mid-1930s. If US labor productivity continued to grow at the rate set in 1950-1972, then by 2011 it would have reached a value that is one third higher than in reality. In other countries of the first world, the picture is about the same.

“It is not so much the slowdown in growth after 1972 that is to be explained, but the reasons for the acceleration that occurred around 1913 and ushered in the glorious sixty-year period between the First World War and the early seventies, during which productivity growth in the United States outstripped anything observed before or after those times."

Gordon believes that the surge was caused by a new industrial revolution that took place during this period. The end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century saw electrification, the spread of internal combustion engines, breakthroughs in the chemical industry, and the emergence of new types of communication and new media, in particular cinema and television. Growth continued until their potential was used up to the end.

But what about electronics and the Internet, which have become truly massive only in the last twenty years? From Gordon's point of view, they had a much smaller impact on the economy than electricity, internal combustion engines, communications and chemicals - the "big four" of the industrial revolution of the early 20th century - and therefore much less important:

“The Big Four has been a much more powerful source of productivity growth than anything that has emerged in recent times. Most of the inventions that we see now are "derivatives" from old ideas. VCRs, for example, brought together television and cinema, but the fundamental impact of their introduction cannot be compared to the effect of the invention of one of their predecessors. The Internet, too, basically leads to the replacement of one form of entertainment by another - and nothing more.

Peter Thiel is of the same opinion: the Internet and gadgets are not bad, but by and large they are still small things. This idea is succinctly expressed in the motto of his investment firm Founders Fund: "We dreamed of flying cars, but got 140 twitter characters." A column in the Financial Times, co-written by Thiel and Garry Kasparov, expands on the same idea:

“We can send photos of cats to the other side of the world using our phones and watch old movies about the future while we are in the subway built a hundred years ago. We can write programs that realistically simulate futuristic landscapes, but the real landscapes around us have hardly changed in half a century. We have not learned how to protect ourselves from earthquakes and hurricanes, travel faster or live longer.”

On the one hand, it is difficult to disagree with this. Nostalgia for a simple and optimistic retro future is completely natural. On the other hand, the complaints of pessimists, despite the numbers and graphs they cite, do not fit well with the crazy reality outside the window. It really doesn't look much like the dreams of the sixties, but the resemblance to outdated dreams is a dubious criterion for determining value.

Ultimately, futuristic spaceships and flying cars are pretty simple ideas. Both are just extrapolations into the future of what existed in the past. A flying car is just a car, and a starship with Captain Kirk at the head is a fantastic variation on a World War II warship.

— Autonomous self-driving cars capable of driving on ordinary roads without human assistance are successfully being tested. Local governments in the United States are already debating what to do with them: driverless cars do not fit well into normal traffic rules.

— The lion's share of stock exchange operations are not carried out by people, but by special programs that make thousands of transactions per second. At this speed, they are uncontrollable, so most of the time they act on their own. Unforeseen combinations of algorithms have already led to instant market crashes, and even lengthy investigations do not always find the cause of what happened.

- The main weapon of the United States in the Middle East has quietly become unmanned aerial vehicles, controlled by satellite from another continent. And this is the technology of the nineties. In laboratories, autonomous robots are being tested with might and main - both flying and ground.

- Google has released electronic glasses that automatically find and show the user the information that they think is most useful to him at the moment. In addition, the glasses are able to record everything that he sees at any time. Oh yes, they also have a built-in voice translator for many languages.

- 3D printers, on the one hand, have fallen in price to such a level that almost everyone can buy them, and on the other hand, they have reached a resolution at which it is possible to print objects with details of about 30 nanometers. In order to photograph printed matter, an electron microscope is required.

“The very idea that an ordinary video cable can hide inside a full-fledged, but very small computer running Unix, until recently would have seemed absurd. Now this is a reality: it is easier for developers to take a ready-made single-chip system than to develop a specialized microcontroller.

This is not a list of the most amazing things, but only what lies on the surface itself. In fact, this list can be continued indefinitely - especially if, in addition to information technologies that are close to us, we touch on biotechnology, materials science and other rapidly developing fields of knowledge that are not very clear to a person from the street.

Boring? This is because the big is seen from a distance, and we got to the very epicenter. Habit prevents us from noticing how strange things are going on around us.

To call all this trifles that do not deserve special attention, as Thiel does, will not work. Each of these inventions, no matter how frivolous at first glance, has (or at least can have) a huge impact on the way people live.

See for yourself. What will be the impact of the spread of Google Glass? Even if you do not take into account the fact that they are constantly studying their owner in order to better understand what information and when he may need it (and this in itself is a very interesting direction in the development of interfaces), remember the camera built into the glasses. Add to it facial recognition and Internet search - and think about how this will affect the daily life of the user of such a device. And the possibility of creating a continuous video archive of one's own life (this is also called lifelogging)? It is no coincidence that some are already sounding the alarm and calling for a ban on Google Glass - realizing that if such a device becomes popular, it will be harder to ignore than mobile phones today.

The self-driving car is also a blow to the traditional way of life. All the consequences that the general availability of such technology can lead to are difficult not only to enumerate, but also to predict. Here are a couple of popular predictions. First, a self-driving car does not have to wait for the driver in the parking lot. It may well serve not one, but several people. This, in turn, will lead to a complete change in the very approach to car ownership. Secondly, robots behave on the road much more accurately than people. This means that hundreds of thousands of accidents per year, ending in the death of people, can be forgotten. Finally, do not forget about the time that people spent behind the steering wheel. It will be freed up for other activities.

Even such an ordinary thing as a cable with a built-in computer is not a trifle at all. There are no trifles in such cases at all. The effect of reducing the cost of existing technology is often completely unpredictable and can outweigh the effect of new inventions. What will be the consequences of further reductions in the cost and power consumption of single-chip computers that can run Unix? Read about ubiquitous computing and sensor networks.

Mobile phones, which Thiel dismissed so easily, do indeed allow you to "send photos of cats to the other side of the world." But not only cats. With the same ease, they allow gigabytes of classified information to be copied and published on the Internet, causing an international diplomatic scandal. And frivolous means of communication like Facebook, Blackberry text messaging, and Twitter with its 140 characters reduce the complexity of mass communication by reducing the need to deliberately organize joint actions of groups of people. Even the iPhone, the exemplary symbol of mindless consumerism, turns out to be a very important milestone upon closer inspection: it was he who spurred the development of a new generation of computers after a quarter of a century of stagnation.

Why is this not reflected in economic indicators? Most likely, it finds, but not as expected by economists. Previous industrial revolutions led to increases in productivity and the emergence of new industries. This one, on the contrary, makes entire industries unviable and pushes a lot of things out of the money economy.

The producers of easy-to-copy content were the first to feel this - the music industry, the media, book publishers, Hollywood. Their business models are devoured on both sides by widespread illegal copying and a huge number of amateurs who suddenly have the opportunity to compete on equal terms with professionals for the attention of viewers.

Look in the folders where you keep pirated movies and music and calculate how much you would have to shell out for their legal versions. This is the amount that economists failed to take into account when they calculated the gross domestic product per capita. The value of the product that you have consumed has not been diminished by the fact that you have not paid a penny for it, but it has been taken out of the brackets of the economy.

Every successful technology company wipes out the potential profits of thousands of competitors in the same market by traditional methods. Craigslist almost single-handedly ruined the paid classifieds market that had fed American newspapers for a hundred years. No traditional encyclopedia can compete with Wikipedia, which is technically not even a commercial organization. AirBnB is knocking the chair out from under the hotel industry (only in some niches so far, but it will be), and Uber has made life much more difficult for traditional taxis. And so on and so forth.

Meanwhile, industrial robots, which have been delayed due to the availability of cheap labor in Southeast Asia, are becoming more attractive. Foxconn, one of China's largest electronics makers, is threatening to replace hundreds of thousands of workers with machines. If things go like this, the labor market will follow other markets that are being killed by new technologies, and economists will have to invent some other economy.

At least then, for sure, no one will come to complain that progress has ended. It didn't end, it just went the wrong way.

Registration number 0148029 issued for the work:

Oh, how rapidly scientific and technological progress broke into our daily life! Twenty years ago, you had to stand in line to install a telephone, and now everyone, regardless of age, owns a personal mobile phone and, sometimes, more than one. Previously, only science fiction writers could read about video communication, but now the SKYPE program on the Internet makes it possible to both see and hear the interlocutor. Mail, moving into the category of electronic, allows you to exchange letters, postcards and photographs with friends in a matter of minutes. What can we say about household appliances! While a modern machine is washing clothes, the bread maker is already blushing another loaf of bread, and the slow cooker reports that the borscht is ready. Life is like in a fairy tale! So? That's just the number of happy people for some reason is not growing. And the matter is not at all in the number of purchased food processors and dishwashers.

Man has always dreamed that hard physical labor, including domestic labor, would be replaced by mechanisms and robots. Then he, the man, will be able to do something else, more interesting, useful. What comes to the surface? The Internet (technique again!) fills the vacuum of free time, replaces live communication with a surrogate, and displaces the real life of the virtual. A sedentary lifestyle behind a “box”, nervous overstrains of “gambling”, as you know, affect not only today's health, but also the future of human society as a whole.

Trusting technology, we forget the rules of spelling (the computer will correct it!), Even the simplest calculations are carried out on a calculator - all this does not contribute to the progress of the person himself, rather the opposite. Tell me, do we live in a world of information? But is it all needed? And is it worth it to fill the cells of our memory? Maybe we should think more about those around us. Warm human relations cannot be replaced by any machine, and this is exactly what is lacking for those who “hang” on the World Wide Web.

Man is a child of nature. And, like all children, he loves toys that technical progress supplies him with. But just as kids sometimes grab matches and kindle them without thinking about the danger (only because they are interested in it), so a person, “playing too much”, allows machines to assert themselves in secondary roles.

It has long been known that movement is life, and no computer technology will challenge this saying. It is the physical movement that activates the thought, gives impetus to the development, improvement of the personality. No pictures on the Internet will convey the freshness of the wind, the smell of herbs, the coolness of sea water. No correspondence with a “network” addressee can replace real feelings of friendship and love. The exorbitant passion for various gadgets of modern man leads him away from what nature has laid down. And she is a serious lady, she does not forgive mistakes, including the dominance of a machine over a person, even in everyday life. Hence all the misfortunes - illness, loneliness, regression. Is this what we really need?

Technological progress is a wonderful thing, but it must be “consumed” within reasonable limits ...