The word technology is all-encompassing. The shaping of a rock to be used as a crude tool to cut trees for shelter or shape branches for spears could be classified as technology. In a broad sense, technology could easily include all the tools, utensils, machines, etc. we use every day.

In that sense, the answer to my question is relatively simple. Given the choice of sleeping under a tree and having just my bare hands to keep me alive – or living as we do today, I will take the Sealy Posturepedic every single time. So instead of the broad picture of technology, which I think we can safely say improves our lives, does modern electronic technology improve our lives?

Around the time that WWII ended, a phenomenon call the ‘tyranny of numbers’ was noted where some computational devices were so complex that the loss from failures and downtime exceeded any benefits. Traditional electronics had reached a standstill.

The first significant step forward occurred in 1948 when the first working transistor was built but the more important invention was the operation of the first working Integrated Circuit (IC) which occurred in 1960. As Jack Kilby, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the Integrated Circuit, said, “What we didn't realise then was that the Integrated Circuit would reduce the cost of electronic functions by a factor of a million to one. Nothing had ever done that for anything before.”

In 1975 the Cray 1 Supercomputer was introduced. It weighed over 5t and sold for US$8.86 M (AU$59M in current terms) and was capable of 80 Million Floating Operations per Second (MFLOPS).

A current Apple Watch weighs 125g, sells for AU$529 and is capable of 6 GFLOPS. By comparison, that is a device on our wrist that is eighty times faster than a seventies supercomputer but the Cray 1 was 150,000 times dearer and 40,000 times heavier.

But does that improvement in electronic technology improve our lives?

I often hear people bemoan the fact that technology is taking over the world or has taken over our lives. I remember being in Sydney at a café and noticed four Gen Z people sitting at a table. Not only were they not talking but all four had their head in their phones. I pulled up a chair and sat down at the table and pulled out my phone to do the same. They stopped and looked at me and each other – obviously wondering why this old guy was sitting down at their table. I asked if they knew each other. They said they did.  I apologised and told them that I thought this was the table for people that had no friends but wanted to use their smartphones. I walked away chuckling to myself but when I looked back they had missed my point and were all back on their smartphones – probably tweeting about some weird old guy that just hassled them and what a great time they were having with their friends.

People are losing the ability to communicate (and communicate doesn’t mean send a tweet to your followers). The average person uses their smartphone 221 times per day. The group from 18-24 use their phones for 4.3 hours every day but even the over-55 group are on their phones for over 2 hours each day. The average person watches 4.9 hours of television every day and sits in front of a computer for 3.6 hours.

By the time you get through your screen time then sleep, eat and shower, no wonder it feels like there is no time left to talk to people. It sounds like I might be building an argument for technology being detrimental to our lives but I am not quite there.

The bottom line is that we have a choice. A phone has a button that you can use to turn it off. We make active choices to spend time in front of our devices. Used wisely, the choice and power that electronic technology gives us can absolutely improve our lives. We just need to remember that we are the master and our devices are the slaves. If those roles are reversed, that is when we have a problem.