The claim that the primary goal of technological advancement to increase efficiency to gain more leisure time would be one that I cannot fully agree with. Although I believe that technological advancement can help increase efficiency in certain tasks, I do not believe it is the primary goal of efficiency for leisure time. Additionally, this cannot be applied to all circumstances of advancement. Instead, I believe that the primary goal of technological advancement should be for the betterment of society, if this opens up more time for leisure, then it is a beneficial by-product of advancement that is to be enjoyed.
The advancement of the phone technology from first being able to make a call, then having a small device in which you can send text to someone immediately, and to even making video calls. Such advancement has been seen to increase efficiency in connecting with people. In our personal lives, we are just one phone call away from connecting with a loved one. At the workplace, online meetings take place constantly. This helps to cut down travel time taken to meeting places which can now be put to better use such as doing more productive work.
In the current Covid-19 pandemic, efficiency in conducting tests is one of the primary goal in the fight against Covid-19. The first known test that worked to test for the virus took about a day. With this technology shared globally to research labs and the use of advanced of scientific tools, the current gold-standard test now only takes three hours to sequence. As Covid-19 is a highly contagious disease when there is efficient and effective testing, governments are better equipped with timely information about who to quarantine and isolate. As such, the claim’s notion of being efficient for leisure time is not applicable here.
However, in this day and age where everything is fast-paced, it is difficult for people to find time for leisure, it would be beneficial to gain more leisure time when we are more efficient because of technology. For example, travelling across the globe is now a lot faster with airplanes instead of taking boats when aviation had not been invented. When it took several days to get from South America to Europe, now it only takes a couple of hours. This creates more time to explore countries that one is visiting. Thus, being able to have more leisure time because of technological advancements can be applied in such context.
With these reasons in mind, I cannot fully agree with the claim of the primary goal of technological advancement to increase efficiency to gain more leisure time. Instead, the claim should be tweaked to say that one of the goals of technological advancement is to increase efficiency to gain more leisure time that is a benefit that we are able to enjoy.