Computers Complicate Our Lives Through Multitasking

Computers were originally introduced to help un-complicate our lives and make tasks easier.  They would free up our time of researching, which would ultimately allow us to do more and perform more adequately.  According to Brian Hayes in Automation on the Job,

“Nearly everyone agreed that people would be working less once computers and other kinds of automatic machinery became widespread.  For optimists, this was a promise of liberation: At last humanity would be freed from constant toil, and we could all devote our days to more refined pursuits.  But others saw a threat: Millions of people would be thrown out of work, and desperate masses would roam the streets.”

Going off of these statements, computers do help us when and nowadays where ever possible, but we try and multitask so often, it seems our workload wasn’t actually relieved at all.  In actuality, the invention of automation and computers only brought on more work for our generation because there is so much information available to us, we don’t necessarily know our limits and when enough is enough.  Knowing when to stop and not surpass boundaries are very helpful, especially if it prevents you from overworking or spending too much of our precious time on one little thing when we could be focusing our attention on another task at hand (multitasking at its finest).

Becoming so adapted to always doing more than one thing at a time has its benefits, such as getting more things done faster and easier, but it also has its weaknesses.  The main weakness of automation and multitasking is the fact that we have such a difficult time staying focused on just one thing nowadays.  This process can slow us down and naturally we’d have a harder time even retaining anything about our project we are working on.  I personally have this issue where staying focused was difficult for me even before the huge impact technology made on my life.  As I adapted to overcoming noise distractions and such, technology was introduced and my attention span rebooted, back to its old habits.  Computers will always be favored by my generation, whether they help us or not.

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