Technology. How much is enough?

According to a lot of alcoholics and a famous Ozzy Osbourne song too much is never enough. The idea for healthy successful living is supposed to be everything in moderation. When it comes to food, sugar, salts, protein, carbohydrates, none of them taken in small doses are actually bad for you. In fact, your body needs all of these things. And in moderation even alcohol is healthy and good for you.

The problems come when we focus on one of these things to the exclusion of others. Then we get things like atherosclerosis, diabetes, heart disease, liver poisoning and a host of other issues.

A few decades ago it was believed that we would never need more than 640k of memory for our personal computers. Now anything less than a couple of gigabytes is considered unacceptable. That is an increase of more than one thousand times what we had then.

Computers used to take up enormous rooms all by themselves. Now a complete computer, one that is many times more powerful than those, can fit in the palm of your hand. In fact, telephones used to be big and bulky and the only purpose they could serve was verbal communication. Today cell phones are more compact, have better reception than phones originally did, and they serve many of the same functions that people would previously buy a computer for. You can use them to check your email, record and send pictures and photos, download and play games and browse the internet.

There was a time when Microsoft said that it would never be upgrading to a 32 bit operating system. The current iterations are 64 bits.

At first people used to have to physically travel to a location to obtain data about a thing. Then we learned to write letters to the people that knew the information and wait for replies. Following that we came up with the brilliant idea of storing groups of documents in single buildings called libraries. Now, we have the most fantastic idea ever for storing and sharing data. The internet. With this amazing tool we can find data about nearly any topic we can imagine, from anywhere that has an online connection, which is practically, everywhere

Computers didn't used to have hard drives because what could you possibly need to store? The first computers with hard drives had kilobytes of storage. Terabytes are common storage units today. The sum total of knowledge accumulated on different forms of media around the world was estimated, in 2007, to be about 295 exabytes. It goes, gigabyte, terabyte,petabyte, then exabyte. So an exabyte is about a billion gigabytes of data or a million terabytes.

 We've gone from bytes to terabytes in a few short decades. It might be just a couple of more before we get to exabytes. So... once we have expanded our data storage to the point where we can hold about 300 million terabytes of data on one drive, are we done?

Of course not. Then there will be some new and even more spectacular goal like micronizing it or direct neural interfacing to make all that data available to us without the need for bulky hardware. There is always some new frontier to cross when it comes to technology, some way to make it faster, stronger, smarter, or somehow just plain better.

The sad fact of the matter is that in nearly every case, we have yet to realize the full potential of the technology we already have, before the next big thing comes out to make it even "better".

And every year as the new devices come out we devour them with an avarice and appetite that is truly frightening. We lose nearly all sense of humanity and care for our neighbor and gain some kind of mad lust in our frantic rush to go get the new shiny thing. A practical feeding frenzy over the new I-phone or the latest game. 

And that's not all. There's internet addiction..An inability to relate to people or real world circumstances due to too much time spent online. Cancers related to too much cell phone usage. Accidents caused by digital media distracting drivers and many other problems and diseases that come from relying too much on today's technology.

If you are one of those people that thinks too much tech is never enough, maybe you have a problem and should look into some lower tech ways to live and enjoy life. Go outside once in awhile. Meet real people. I am not saying get rid of the electronic goodies, just realize that life can still be good without them.