I often hear the following lament: If someone or something sabotaged and destroyed our

infrastructure, no one would be equipped to survive. We are too lazy and technology has made us
that way.
Theres no question that weve become far more dependent on technology. It makes our lives
easier. You could even argue that technology has made us complacent; that weve come to
depend on it to solve our problems. But does complacency equal laziness?
Well lets take a step back and evaluate the goals of technological innovation. Many of the
technological advances of the last century were designed primarily as time-saving devices.
Washing machines, dishwashers, and microwaves (to name but a few) all exist to help us save
time (and take it from someone who has lived without these; they can save hours in the course of
a single week). But what are we doing with all that extra time?
According to the Department of Labor, the average American spends 2.7 hours a day watching
television. There go all those hours we saved (and then some!) using time-saving technologies.
Here is a mental image of what these time-saving devices have given us: zombiefied Americans
staring blankly at their TV screens.

America's favorite pastime (2.7 hrs/day)

Lets not blame technology for this. Technologies cant make decisions for us (as much as people
would like them to). What we do with the free time that technology has given us is entirely up to
us. That we have decided to spend that time unproductively indoors is no fault of technologys (if
its any indication of just how unproductive weve become, those same statistics linked above
say that the average 15-19 year-old spends 6 minutes per weekend day reading [presumably this
does not count online content]).
Think about what you want from technology. Perhaps youd like to be free from performing
certain menial tasks. Maybe you want time to write that novel youve been dreaming about, but
instead you veg out in front of your television set every day after work. Remember only this: that
is entirely your choice.
So I ask again: does technology make us lazy? No. Weve made ourselves lazy.

Technology making us lazy or making life

just plain easy?
October 4, 2011 at 11:18 am

In todays society technology has become a life necessity. Lets face

it, technology has made our lives easier. However some people would see this as making lives
lazy. You can perceive it both ways actually. What I mean by this is that yes, technology has
most definitely made our lives easier today than people had it 10 years ago or more. But yes it
can also make people lazy. If you rely on technology for everything and it causes you to not lift a
finger to do anything, then that is just laziness. Use technology to an extent and do not let it
cause you to let it shut you down socially and break your hard work ethic.
Most people use some aspects of technology as ways to socialize. This does make lives easy as
far as making friends and meeting people. But do not let it stop there. Actually meet people in
person and get out in the world. There is so much out there that you cannot experience from your
computer or video game consoles. Yes technology makes work easier, but do not cause that to
lose your hard work ethics that you were raised with and certainly do not let that cause you to not
instill these ethics in our children whom are our future leaders of the world.
What I ask you is, what do you think that technology does to us as a society. Does it cause us to
be lazy people? Does it cause us to be a world in which relies on technology alone, a technology
that can be shut down or disrupted and then where will we be as a society if we do not have any
skills. For example if people rely on computers for calculating and counting, then they went out
and we didnt know how to figure this out without them. Where would we be? Technology is
constantly advancing, and the news and other media advertisers such as magazines and television
commercials advertise for technology every day. Use technology as it is intended, which is to
make life easier and to have fun, but not to be lazy.

Is Technology Making Humans more Lazy

Yes
By: Bharath Mohan

Published: February 20, 2011

When the wheel was first invented, it was a great invention, but it did not make people much
lazier, for they could only pull objects with them instead of carrying them. However, as the
"technology" of the wheel advanced, people decided to use other animals to pull them, in order
to do less work. Fast forward a few thousand years, and some people now complain to walk a
few block to get something, when our ancestors often had to walk miles for the nearest
resources; that is, assuming there was any nearby. The more technology advances, the more we
force that technology to do our work for us, and the less we realize how lazy we are getting.
Technology as a whole can be defined as something that helps humans be lazy. For example, the
definition of a machine is "any object that reduces the amount of human effort needed to
complete a task." Paraphrased, that reads as "anything that helps humans work less to get
something done." The definition of laziness is: "averse or disinclined to work." The usage of
machines and the increase of laziness implicitly go hand in hand; the more machines we use, the
lazier we become. In addition, technology is "the branch of knowledge that deals with the
application of sciences to make better machines." There fore, technology is, by definition,
increasing the amount of work machines do, and, by proxy, increasing the amount of laziness
present among humans. As high-industries are on the rise, technology is improved on and
innovated upon more and more; the open market only spurs on this trend. As a result, the more
technology improves, the lazier humans as a whole become.
A great example of how lazy technology makes us is present in any of the TV series branched off
of Star Trek. With their access to transporters and other technology we can only dream of these
days, they have grown jaded with true work, preferring to leave it to the computer with a simple
voice command.
The advancement of technology contributes directly to the increasing laziness among humans.
After all, one of humans' most popular refrains is "You don't need to reinvent the wheel." There's
reason not to, as it would be an intriguing challenge, except for the growing laziness among
humans. In fact, reinventing the wheel may make it more efficient than before.

Technology Advancements Making Society Lazy

Every day a person is given many choices and its their responsibility to make the
correct ones according to their conscience. With technology in their hands, those
choices are being influenced for better or worse. Technology gives people two
choices, one being the potential to become lazy and two the possibility to become
more effective in their daily lives. Presently, with technology so increasingly
abundant, it has become substantially harder to use it effectively. With that being
said, is technology more than likely the cause of obesity and children becoming
lazier? Technology has advanced in so many great ways but with those
advancements come consequences and a major one is that society has become
very lazy. Although technology is advancing, its not technologys fault that society
is so reliant upon it. Paul Mobley stated in his article Technology Induced Laziness
that technology devices are reducing physical labor (Mobley, 2006). This is a major
problem for our society because technology advancements are making Americans
both physically and mentally lazy. Technology availability is reducing the physical
health among Americans. So many devices are easily accessible that even the
littlest of tasks are seemingly unreasonable. The electric razor shaves us, and
the electric toothbrush cleans our teeth Physical labor is reduced to the point
where it might be called laziness, or can become physical laziness (Mobley, 2006
p.1). The every day devices that people use are reducing their level of physical
activity because they are always looking for ways to get things done quicker with
less work involved. What people dont realize is that they are becoming mentally
numb for the things that they should be doing. People never turn off their phones
because they are always...

How many of us could go a week without our cell phone? Do you even bother to memorize
phone numbers anymore? I cant even recall the last time I went a day without looking at the
internet at all. Technology has made life so convenient for us that its almost scary to think of
what would happen if we had to go without our favorite gadget for an extended period of time.
We have to face facts: Technology has made us lazy.

No need to leave the house for entertainment

Whats the point of getting up, taking a shower, getting dressed, and driving to the movies when
you can just sit on the couch and fire up Netflix? Weve all been there before. Youre on the
fence about whether or not you want to get out and do something, but then something comes
over you. You start looking around at your PS3 and laptop, then realize you can have just as
much fun staying in the house.
To make things worse, Nintendo and Microsoft had to go ahead and release the Wii and Kinect
(respectively). Thanks to these two addictive gadgets, you can go bowling, play tennis, or
participate in the Olympic Games in your living room.

Is it even possible to get lost anymore?

I get the feeling that were getting closer and closer to the day when people wont even be able to
read paper maps anymore. There are already a good deal of young adults that have no idea how
to navigate through their own cities without using a GPS.
The beginning of the demise of paper maps was MapQuest. Being able to print out complete turn
by turn directions for where you need to go pretty much killed the need for a map. But even with
MapQuest, some people still kept a map in their cars just in case of emergencies.
Once TomTom and Garmin hit the scene, paper maps became obsolete. Even MapQuest is
getting used a lot less frequently thanks to GPS apps. You can use Google Maps on your smart
phone and get voice guided turn by turn directions for free. Even people with no sense of
direction can get to where they need to be with todays technology.
Oh yea, and now Apple is getting involved in the GPS industry so the future of paper maps isnt
looking too bright. Soon, Boys Scouts will be teaching kids how to use a GPS instead of how to
navigate with a compass.

Find the answer to anything with Google

We have all Googled something that we were completely embarrassed we didnt know the
answer to. According to Google, How to tie a tie gets over 500,000 searches a month. For
some reason, over 1,000 people are searching how to boil water and how to boil eggs gets
over 40,000 searches per month.

Google has made the process of learning how to do things extremely easy. There was once a time
when if you didnt know how to do something, you had to either:

Know someone that knew how to do it

Try to figure it out and mess up until you got it right

Not anymore. A quick search on Google will bring up instructional YouTube videos, blog posts,
and PDFs that show you how to do anything. So much for being self sufficient.

Is technology hurting us by making life easier?

Is technology making us lazy or efficient? Should we be

thanking Google's engineers or lament that technology is
dooming us to intellectual laziness?
With GPS technology now nearly ubiquitous on smartphones and tablets, there is little need for
maps and a sense of direction.
By: Michael Oliveira The Canadian Press, Published on Thu Dec 27 2012

TORONTOCanadians may be among the world's most prolific Internet users but it seems all
that time online hasn't made us a nation of careful spellers.
Many of us often type facebok into Google and rather than correcting the obvious mistake, let
the search engine fix it. Monitoring Canadians search habits would reveal that many, many more
consistently type in faceboo, faebook and fcaebook but they know Google will get the
point.
Others can't be bothered to tap out even eight characters and have learned that entering just
face or fb will get them exactly the link they're seeking.
Is that lazy or efficient? Should we be thanking Google's engineers for saving us a few seconds
or lament that technology is dooming us to intellectual laziness?
It seems hardly anyone can remember phone numbers anymore since we started storing them in
our mobile phones.
Outside of schools and some workplaces, the practice of putting pen to paper is becoming
increasingly rare. To many, scribbling with a pen feels quaint in today's digital age.
Who needs maps and a sense of direction with GPS technology which is now nearly
ubiquitous on smartphones and tablets to guide the way?
And now voice recognition software is exploding in efficiency and popularity, raising the
prospect that typing could eventually become another skill that's made redundant by convenient,
task-relieving technology.
For Matthew Thomas, 33, it was the signing of a birthday card that made him consider just how
infrequent old-fashioned manual tasks like handwriting have become in his typical routine.
I realized how rarely I'm actually ever writing anything by hand and there was like a moment of
panic where I felt a little scared because as I was writing I was having a hard time, Thomas said,

noting that he felt the need to concentrate more and think about the act of writing compared to
the automatic process of typing.
When you're typing you don't really think, you don't have to think (and autocorrect) thinks
for you. So I was like, Wow, I'm really scary now when I don't have Google or spellcheck to
help me out.
More than a decade of work has gone into the technology that powers Google's autocorrect
abilities, which anticipate what users want to say as they type even if their spelling is way off
base.
Google would be a great judge of whether our spelling abilities have deteriorated with the advent
of autocorrect tools but Mark Paskin, a senior staff software engineer, said the company hasn't
studied those kinds of changes.
But there are clear hints that users have grown lazier with their typing, knowing Google will
back them up.
Much like the face and fb searches, the most popular queries entered into Google are oneword entries that produce an easy link to a website. For example, the most common search in
Canada over the past nine years is Facebook, followed by YouTube. The fourth most popular of
all searches? You, which for most users would produce a link to YouTube.
If the user is doing it intentionally and it gets them to what they want then from (our
perspective) that's a fine query because that's what we're trying to do, get the users what they
want, Paskin said.
There's no doubt that today's technology is radically altering our day-to-day life and how we
function and think, said Martin Hand, an associate professor at Queen's University.
I would never think of it in terms of, Is it good or bad? Is it helping or hurting or something
like that ... but it's almost impossible to achieve anything without some engagement with some
software, Hand said.
There's something slightly different with the technologies and media we're currently using in
that they've become completely infrastructural, ambient, unavoidable, they're more like
electricity than television, such that it's very difficult to actually engage in any tasks without
negotiating technology in one form or another.
While old skills are no doubt fading away, technology is leading to the creation of new skills,
which come with a new set of expectations, he added.

Sometimes there's a bemoaning that (students) don't know how to write anymore or they can't
do handwriting, but they're expected to do all sorts of other things. In a sense it makes things
easier but it doesn't make life easier, it changes these other things you've got to be able to do, he
said.
There's a co-evolution of technology and ways of doing things and the expectations that come
along with. There are new skills you're required to have.
Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil agrees that the eventual loss of time-tested skills isn't a crisis for our
species and represents part of our evolution.
We are already a biological non-biological civilization that's augmented by the tools we
created, said Kurzweil.
There was controversy when I went to college about these new mobile devices you could carry
around that would calculate arithmetic. There was controversy that kids wouldn't learn how to do
arithmetic and probably kids' arithmetic skills have fallen off. But they've put that effort now
into better things, actually learning how to solve problems and create new knowledge.
"Yes, we've become dependent on technology and it's not going away."