I found this article about the philosopher Luciano Floridi very intriguing. When he said that we don't understand the shift to the digital world nearly enough, I felt myself agreeing with him. These days our online presence takes up so much of our life that it almost outshines our real-life presence, and I think that's a scary thing to think about. Don't get me wrong, I really like the digital world and it's so nice that we can do so many things online, but I feel like having too much of it will eventually take away from other aspects of our lives, if it hasn't already. The question I think a lot of people ask is "is there really such thing as too much technology?" To me the answer is yes. I think that we get so wrapped up in things on our phones and computers that we forget to enjoy other things. We forget to spend time outside or time doing things without being connected or having to document what we're doing on social media platforms so everyone can see how much "fun" we're having. Are we really having fun or are we doing it to impress others? I also think that, while technology is good for many workplaces, it could also be a distraction. With so much technology people have so much less work to do, but it makes me wonder if they are putting enough effort into the lessened workload they have, or if they are more lazy and doing the bare minimum to get by.

A quote from this article that stood out to me was from Floridi's book The Fourth Revolution. It says "as we gradually become surrounded by and coupled to smart gadgets which manipulate the information we promote about ourselves, we acquire an onlife personality—one different from our real world ‘embodied’ personality." This word "onlife" stuck out to me at first because I thought it was misspelled, but looking back it made more sense that he was combining our online life and our real life and making it one. I feel like this quote was the one that caught my eye the most throughout the whole article because it made me think. It made me think about how different our online personalities are than our real life ones, and it also made me kind of sad to think about. With less face-to-face interaction and more online interaction, our online personalities are likely the ones that people will believe us to be more like.

I think we are being driven into this digital revolution without even realizing that the line between real-life and the digital world is becoming thinner and thinner, but we aren't noticing how much the two different worlds are blending together, and how much the digital world can affect us in real-life. One thing that eased my mind a little bit was the part of the article that said "we are still a long, long way from a machine with interpretive flexibility." This made me feel like the digital revolution maybe wasn't going as fast as I thought it was going because at this point we can still keep up, but once we hit the point that we can't keep up with our technology I think we might be in trouble. This article was also written in 2015 and 4 years is a lot of time to create new technology, so I wonder what this article would be like if it was rewritten today.

Photo: Technology for an innovative future.

Source:https://www.army.mil/article/187213/work_dod_embracing_innovation_to_fuel_military_overmatch_against_adversaries

Dean, Diane (2015). Lessons from Luciano Floridi, the Google philosopher.