Have you challenged yourself lately?

Technology is a wonderful thing and has great potential of taking our children to a magical place. How great is technology? Our cars are now voice activated and can play a song from our personal collection with a simple voice command. We even have cars that will parallel park themselves. HOW AWESOME is that? So while most people see what we have developed as ways for technology to assist in our difficult tasks, I see it as an excuse to be lazy.

I remember back when I took my drivers license exam, parallel parking and starting out from a dead stop were my two biggest worries. But hey, technology has made those problems go away at the touch of a button. I hate to admit that the push button Alison transmission correlates to my laziness when it comes to driving the fire engine, but it really has; My left leg gets a heck of a workout when attempting to respond in the ol' water tender and its four speed-split rear differential.

Kids are no longer required to develop an imagination. Portable iPod like MP3 players, portable video games, cell phones, internet, yadda yadda yadda...Everything can be found right at the tip of our opposable thumbs. Which I might inject have become considerably stronger than our ancestors. Libraries are places we go to get free wireless internet access and we have traded DNS, IPv4 and IPv6 for the Dewey decimal system. Kidlettes are being born into a society of calculators, high speed internet and all the amenities that makes their lives completely brainless. What ever happened to the slide rule? What an invention that was, can you imagine what kind of knowledge went into developing a sliding scale that did mathematical computations?

Not only is technology making our lives easier but it is allowing us to not even try! As I am typing this there are all sorts of words that are sporting a little red squiggly line. The best part, a quick right click and a left click and all my misspellings are corrected. Of course the word that I choose (wink) might not be correct, but at least it will be properly spelled. As an Engineer, I have an ongoing love affair with spell checkers. I have even been known to use words like 'funner', geekish is my official language. I don't do grammar! I can't imagine what the anal retentive grammatical crowd must think when they read the newspapers, e-mails or even txt msgs these days. I bet some of them could suffer a serious stroke by just reading the Great Falls Tribune. But txt msgs have taught us that of and me are the same, h8 2 go is a complete sentence and even what 'nw r u +?" translates to.

I know I take full advantage of all that technology has to offer and I am just as guilty as the rest of society when it comes to using my technological resources, but even than I do like to challenge my brain on occasion. I shudder to think what society will be like when our great-grandkids are born. Technology has given us the ability to do things better in less time than our forefathers and we have taken advantage of that; as a result we do things with a tenth of the effort with a quarter of the resulting quality.

I will leave you with one simple question, "What would it take for technology to be a tool and not a crutch in my own life?"