The best course I ever took in college was a history course entitled, Technology And Culture.

It was a colloquium requiring a great deal of reading and short written summations of the day’s required readings, as well as our interpretations of what we read.

Additionally, we had to take turns leading the discussions of those readings. Usually, this was a one-class event, but I was up there for four classes and loved every minute of it.

Our professor began the semester by observing that Americans have held an ambiguous and ambivalent view of technology. This was true in 1971 and has grown exponentially in the 21st Century.

Much to our chagrin, I believe there is no longer any ambiguity or ambivalence to what we are not confronting in terms of what technology is doing to us all.

I didn’t have to write any of my own ideas on this matter as all I had to do is to request the AI Ghost In The Machine to fashion such an essay.

Who would be any the wiser?

Well, I would.

It’s cheating isn’t it?

It’s right up there with Biff using a future sports history magazine to find the winners of past games and races, only to pass it on to his younger self in 1985, who then made a fortune gambling on things for which he already had the results.

With every technological advance has come a tradeoff that has either been unpredicted or gladly accepted as the price you had to make for corporate greed.

Yet, there have been a great deal of positive effects that have been a boon to our lives.

Vaccines (you bet your ass) have nearly wiped out diseases such as smallpox, polio, and even AIDS has been controlled, if not cured. While cancer and heart disease have not been eliminated as our major health concerns, certainly advances in treatments have helped in combating these two life threatening diseases.

One of the books our professor had us read for that class in 1971 was Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media.

McLuhan wrote about how technology was creating the Global Village, wherein the world was getting smaller, and that countries would be more akin to neighbors than to separate entities.

My professor observed that just because we were going to be “closer” to other countries in the technological sense did not guarantee that we would like each other, so a global panacea was not guaranteed.

I think he was right about that.

I am not sure there are too many countries that are happy to be closer to America as I type this, but that’s the topic for another day.

Facebook, MySpace, TikTok, YouTube, Blogs, and Podcasts have opened up public expression to those of us who have had no access to the public square and who are bereft of a soapbox. That’s a good thing that still has unintended consequences.

In an era when anyone can say or write anything, it’s impossible to say what is true or false, right or wrong, good or evil.

Well, it’s really not that hard to distinguish any of these if you are looking at other sources and not hooked on a particular source for information.

Thinking for yourself always requires a little work on your part: read books, articles, and talk to people, and not just those who already agree with you.

We have to rely on our own intelligence (which is scary enough to think about) rather than the talking heads who just have a gig to spew the flavor of the day to make the cable networks happy, attract the most clicks, and win their YouTube plaques.

It requires work and analysis, and we can’t let AI eliminate our responsibility to seek the truth.