People use technology every day, but have we become dangerously reliant on it? We have technology to drive us places, preserve and cook our food, entertain, and even inform us of current events. While making our lives much easier technology has also made us really not like going just a few hours without it.

One of our most common devices is our phone, whether it be an iPhone or Android. Everyone that I know has a phone and we use them to stay in contact with each other over long and short distances. Simply because they work much faster and efficiently than almost any other system, the only exception being a full computer that is much more powerful in what it can do by design. The modern phone has replaced the letter mailing service, but should it have? Of course we still have mail, but we no longer rely on it anywhere near what we used to. Perhaps the best reason being the near “instant” part of our new messaging systems.

Not quite as widely accepted but definitely upcoming, self-driving cars. A car that can drive you to work without any interaction. Without you needing to watch the road every second; that is a scary thought to me. I have zero trust in any close box system. If someone can’t look inside a tool and tell me for sure that everything is definitely working one hundred percent accurately, I do not want to trust my life to its successful operation. Not to mention the lives of others that could be affected if the hardware inside the car makes a simple mistake or shorts out and the driver is not paying attention.

We even trust our technology to store our food, mainly because it is the only option at the moment for storing food ahead of time. Examples include the refrigerator and freezer. We have no other natural option, apart from taking advantage of climate or weather, which is not commonplace enough luckily to replace either. So we won’t likely be replacing either any time soon.

We often find ourselves using technology even if we aren’t using it directly in front of us. We could be using it at home or at work even when we are not there. Most people will not even think twice about leaving an appliance running or whether it is going to accomplish anything while they are gone, not to mention the environmental affects that leaving all this technology on has on the planet.