Along with the development of technology, there are great changes in people’s daily lives. On the one hand, the use of technology in various territories brings people great convenience. On the other hand, these advanced techniques may cause some problems in social and personal aspects.
In the essay “Alone Together”, the author, Sherry Turkle, illustrates that the technology not only does offer convenience to people, but also leads people to have inauthentic feelings and self-denial behaviors. Moreover, the intimacy offered by robots leads people to stop communicating with other human beings, and to abandon their real lives.Similarly to Turkle, in another work “Who Holds the Clicker? ” the author Lauren Slater describes a different aspect of how technology affects people’s lives physically. Lauren Slater points out that DBS-deep brain stimulation-is an electric shock to the brain to control people’s behaviors, which becomes a breakthrough of medical technology to treat people who have OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder).
As human beings, people should be able to control their feelings and behaviors, which is a basic human right.However, DBS also means patients’ minds controlled by others, which results in patients have no abilities to control their own feelings and actions. Once this technique is used for something evil like being controlled by terrorists, it will become a disaster for human world. When people enjoy the fun brought by technology, they also need to be aware of the problems caused by it, for instance, the unreal feelings or the inappropriate purposes of medical applications.
Meanwhile, as a mind-control technology, DBS applications should be limited by the government.Based on the facts that technology offers illusion feelings and can changes people’s actions, thus the government should limit some special technologies applications. Technology takes people away from the realities and controls people’s feelings and actions. On the one hand, technology, such as the social media and online games, brings people external feelings of their new lives, and the more people are addicted to the virtual world, the further it takes them away from realities. People spend much time surfing online, talking to strangers under their new identities, which leads to confusion of the world.
However, after a while, people may deny their real identities and do not care about anything in their real lives. Turkle describes her view, “We create ourselves as online person and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves” (Turkle 273).
On the other hand, technology not only offers people an inauthentic world to play the roles they never played before, but also controls and changes people’s physical feelings and emotions.Along with the development of medical technology, the use of advanced medical technology brings a major breakthrough in the fight against people’s diseases, such as OCD. This technique is based on DBS treatment, which can shut down a part of human’s feelings in order to treat OCD. However, one of the side effects of DBS is that people change their emotions very rapidly and unreasonably. Mario, who becomes one of the first American psychiatric patients in Slater’s work, explains his experiences, “When Mario talks about that time now, tears come to his eyes. ‘It was like a miracle, I still have some OCD symptoms but way, way less.
Dr. Greenberg and Rasmussen saved my life’”(Slater 243). Through the DBS treatment, Mario gets a big improvement on his OCD. The function of DBS works as bringing emotional inauthenticity into people’s mind to change their emotions and psychical actions. However, the problem is not that simple for the reason that the DBS treatment works by cheating people’s brain to create unreal feelings. In addition, when patients are driving or swimming while something wrong with DBS, as a result, the huge mental changes will lead people to lose control and fall into dangerous situations.
Therefore, people should be able to control their feelings and actions. However, as a remarkable technique for anti-OCD, DBS treatment brings a moral question: should people or patients control their own feelings and actions instead of being controlled by someone else like robots? In medical field, DBS has achieved a great level of success in treating OCD, but it can largely control people’s feelings and actions via influencing people’s moral judgment, and it not only affect themselves but their family as well.Mario’s experience is a good example at this point, like what he feels when“ After a few taps, the sadness went away. ‘With DBS the things has a certain immediacy to it. ’ Says Dr.
Steven Rasmussen, Mario’s other psychiatrist. ‘You can change behavior very, very rapidly. On the flip side of it there’s a danger too. This really is a kind of mind control, you know what I mean’”(Slater 239). Once OCD patients are treated by DBS, their psychical feelings and actions are just controlled through typing on clickers, and people become robots in a way.
Nevertheless, as an individual human being, everyone has their own view of the world, and every person has the right to be the owner of his or her own moral judgment, behavior and, ultimately, mind, even as for prisoners. The remarkable technique carries off people’s human right of self-control. As a consequence, DBS will control people like the way they control robots. The desire for control makes people feel powerful and satisfied. As Turkle describes her points, “So, I turned the pages of Levy’s book with a cool eye.
What if a robot is not a ‘form of life’ but a king of performance art?What if ‘relating’ to robots makes us feel ‘good’ or ‘better’ simply because we feel more in control” (Turkle 268). The reason why robots partners become more and more popular is because people much prefer to have the no-risk relationships with robots instead of human beings, and people like to control others. However, if human beings become the controlled targets instead of robots, they will lose their ability of making judgment and self-control, which will become a disaster for human civilizations. And it becomes the one important reason why the government should control DBS applications.The government has the responsibility to control DBS applications in order to avoid iniquitous purposes instead of using it to control the prisoners. As a dangerous technique, like nuclear power, DBS can totally control people’s minds and actions; it is sort of against the order of nature.
Once terrorists use this technique to control people to attack other people or countries, DBS helps the terrorist attacks become easier and more convenient. Therefore, the government should limit the use of DBS and place it securely, such as only for medical use.At the same time, the government should not control the prisoners’ mind via DBS to reduce crimes. In Slater’s work, she proves a experiment of prisoners’ mind control in the mid-1970s, “…particularly African American, were more than a little perturbed at the thought that mind control was sees as a viable solution to social injustices or crime. Meanwhile, the CIA was rumored to be experimenting with implants to break down POWs and discredit rebellious citizens…”(Slater 236).
Prisoners are also human beings so that they possess basic human rights as well. In addition, DBS control is not a solution to reduce crimes for the reason that the prisoners are supposed to face their mistakes and consequences as well as realizing the right value of the world by themselves, instead of being stereotyped like robots.Prisoners are lives, not machines. The most beautiful parts of lives are the unpredictability and reality.
As Turkle describes,“ From the moment you step into the museum and come face-to-face with a full-size dinosaur, you become part of a celebration of life on Earth, what Darwin called ‘endless forms most beautiful’”(Turkle 265). Life is beautiful, and no one has right to take others’ thoughts and judgments away, even the government.Compare with by force of DBS treatment to control prisoners, the government should consider educating prisoners by other methods. In summary, people are easy to addicted to the virtual world which proved by technology, and the more people enjoy of their new but fake identities, the easer for people to ignore the things happened in their real lives.
Meanwhile, as a mind control treatment for OCD, it is hard to escape the problem that after DBS surgery, there are many patients have difficulties with adjustment their relationships with others, self-perception, and works.As a consequence, people are no longer belonging to themselves, and they living like robots; their feelings and actions are controlled by doctors. As a brain control technique, DBS is a kind of an edge technology, because it could be good for patients in order to treat OCD, but bad for the order of the society once bad people use it. So the government has to place it into a safe and limit range of applications. Moreover, scientists are supposed to continue to do in-depth research for better treatments to treat OCD patients, and make people live better.
