Has Technology Actually Made Us Worse Off?
By Chris Jacob

I will give you time to ponder the title question as I give you two examples. Heart disease and heart related problems are one of the leading causes of death in this country. Everyday in offices, homes, planes, on the road, etc. people are suffering heart attacks and inevitably requiring someone to call 000 to organise an Ambulance. In many instances due to traffic, Ambulance shortages and system inefficiencies, paramedics are arriving at a patient’s side to late to prevent major damage or death. In fact in the US, nearly 80 percent of all sudden cardiac arrests occur at home and fewer than 5 percent of those victims survive. In the market place now is a product called a Home Heart Start Defibrillator. This amazing product allows virtually any user to restart a person’s heart that may have stopped by talking a person clearly through the process. It even checks to see whether the electrical pads are in the right place and if the person actually needs the process at all. It even coaches a person trough CPR.

On the other hand we in Australia and indeed the Western World at large is going through an obesity epidemic starting with kids as young as 3. Why are we going through such an epidemic and why is the problem getting worse? Well we drive to school and the shops instead of riding or walking. We watch TV and chat and play games on the computer or games console for entertainment instead of exercising and playing outside. We have less time to cook because of our schedules so we eat more pre-prepared, highly processed and fast food. Basically we have automated so many our tasks because of the Internet and technological devices we have created, that our daily manual labour tasks are now minimal.