Technology: long both the villain and hero of our world. It’s been villainized by the media with regular headlines such as,  “How technology use messes with your sleep and what you can do about it” or “Is a rise in teen depression linked to technology, social media?”, and it’s been similarly long-herofied for its ability to empower the learning process, save lives and connect us with anyone and everyone around the globe. 

This captivating ability to be so controversial, so evidently bad for our physical well being when misused and yet so tantalizingly convenient, so immensely powerful and in all honesty, the closest thing we as people have seen to magic, has allowed it to fester and crawl into every corner of our world; it’s in our schools, it’s in our our places of work, it’s in our homes, it’s in our pockets, it’s even in our bodies. It affects every aspect of our world and has untapped possibilities when it comes to creating a sustainable environment, progression in health science and automation of our workplaces. With this comes equal opportunity for a worsening socioeconomic gap, destruction of our environment and, as a worst case scenario, humans being obsolete in a world where tech rules. 

We have never stood at a higher step on the staircase of ingenuity, and we have never come this close to stumbling back down it. 

Technology, admittedly, isn’t exactly new to our world; nor is it newly a concern for the population, although as technology grows exponentially — due to the fact that as we create more advanced technology we can make larger leaps faster — the concern regarding technology’s growth has followed. 

Although technology is not the problem; humans are. Because currently, we feel we are in the driver’s seat, we are controlling what is developed and when and how far we allow these developments to advance. Technology is subservient to us, and that is exactly where we want it. Technology is inherently prone to fewer flaws than humans; therefore, there may come a time when we relinquish our spot at the wheel, if and only if technology has reached a point where it develops itself, by completely unregulated and unintentioned progress. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

When I say humans are the problem, I by no means am saying it is our responsibility to continue to develop technology and simply see what happens, or to step aside and continuously try to create something smarter than us. I mean it is our job to regulate what we one day may not have complete power over, to change the course of technology, before it paves its own. 

When this idea is applied to technology as a whole it sounds rather daunting, but perhaps look at it on a smaller scale. The New York Times published an article in which Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Daron Acemoglu illustrated the idea that the mass automation of technology is responsible for the worsening economic gap within the United States, due to corporations being all-too-happy to replace flawed, expensive human labor with efficient and cheap mechanical labor. Acemoglu speaks on how technology must be redirected to work for humans, not instead of humans. Think of this as regulating technology as we would anything else: we have the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), we have the Food and Drug Association (FDA), we have the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and explosives (ATF), and yet we do not have a bureau exclusively tasked with monitoring the implementation of technology throughout our lives. 

Now there are of course some regulations when technology is applicable to a certain field. The FDA must review medical devices, for instance. Although there is no regulation on a similar scale to that of which technology is in our lives. It is also not to say that any regulatory group should have a say in what is developed. Rather, there should be some oversight regarding just how quickly and to what extent it can be implemented within corporations and public institutions– that is how we ensure our spot at the steering wheel, even if the car becomes smarter than we are.