In a society today where screens are constantly in front of our faces, we have to wonder: what does constantly having a device in front of us do to us?

  According to a study by mobileinsurance.co.uk, the average person spends four years of his or her life looking down at a smartphone. That’s five percent of the average human’s life being spent disconnected from others; looking down, trying to find satisfaction in a world behind glass.

  Today, it seems that nothing can get done without a computer. The Wi-Fi goes out and then mass panic ensues as people haven’t checked Snapchat or Twitter in the last five minutes. The power goes out at school and we all sit in class and do nothing.

  In the school system, we do most things on computers now. From grades to writing to even simple reading, we are completely reliant on the power grid and Wi-Fi to have a productive day. These things are great to have and can speed up productivity, but we need to have a backup plan in case of an outage.

  Businesses are the same way, as most of their transactions require an internet connection to get to card holder’s companies. At large stores such as Wal-Mart, their registers run with a Windows background, which mean they are a node on a network. If the network goes out, the store would effectively shut down.

  We’ve also begun to rely on technology for everyday things that were better without all of the technology we’ve forced into it.

  Tesla cars now come with autopilot built in, serving the same function as autopilot in an aircraft, but on the ground. As an aspiring pilot, I realize how useful autopilot is in a plane, but in a car seems unneeded. Pilots need it to be able to navigate properly, but drivers just want it so they can be lazy and don’t have to focus on driving.

  This lines up with new studies showing that mankind has become lazier and less attentive as a species.

  A 2013 study by Microsoft Canada concluded that the average human adult attention span is now one second lower than that of a goldfish, now at only eight seconds. That statistic is down from twelve seconds in 2000. This shows that people are starting to get lazy and we are starting to get to the point where we can’t even be attentive long enough to drive a car, so we want our machines to do it for us.

  Many problems in today’s society can be solved by just overcoming our laziness, the biggest of which is our problem with machines taking over jobs.

  Though it might seem like companies seem to be replacing workers with machines in order to cut costs, the fact is that they still have to pay to send electricity to these machines and, in some cases, it can cost more to power a machine to do the job than pay a worker. I believe that we are replacing these jobs, not because we it helps costs, but because the workers are now seeing that a machine can do their job for them, and therefore we can be more lazy.

  In a video by Prince Ea named “Can we auto-correct humanity?,” Ea states that he “imagines a world where we smile when have low battery, because that will mean we’ll be one bar closer to humanity.” Though I agree with him that we need to stop always having tech in our hands, I do believe tech is an amazing asset for us. However, I believe that we need to have backup plans in place so we can still be productive if our tech were to become unavailable, such as having a paper backup available for stores or at least a way to still do business without power.

  We simply need to stop this over-reliance, as if a disaster were to happen today and get rid of our technology, I’m just not sure we would be able to recover efficiently enough to remain. If technology disappears, what would we become?