As people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate.Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take.

To answer this question, there is need to consider the following questions: What kinds of problems does technology solve? And what kinds of thinking is a human capable of? Permit me to rephrase my response as: Most technological developments to date have freed up humans to focus on higher level tasks which require 'higher' thinking skills, but there may be a qualitative boundary technology crosses, from which it becomes capable of solving these higher level tasks for humans. Beyond this point, it might be reasonable to claim that reliance on technology may reduce the ability of people to think for themselves. Given this rephrasal, I can say I agree with the arguement with caveats.

Examples of everyday technologies we tend to rely on include prescription medicine, calculators, word processors. In more specified fields, we might include MRI machines, climate modelling tools, and sonar detectors. Several of these tools free up the human mind to concentrate on higher level tasks. Having a word processor allows for ease of spell checking, but a spelling error free composition is not necessarily the same as a good composition. These require different types of thinking. The same argument could be made for prescription medicine. While a prescription drug might be perfectly capable of addressing an illness, arriving at the prescription, a decision usually made by a doctor, requires a diverse consideration of issues with mental and social dimensions. These are are examples of higher level thinking technology frees up the human mind to engage.

But there exists possibly a qualitative line technological development crosses that changes these dynamics. With complex algorithms, one can dream of a future filled with smart cities. Technology autonomously runs simulation models, considers more variables than a human could possibly think of, and uses the best results to change things within a city that affect all dimensions of human life. Such a technology would be considered more intelligent than even a human. Such a technology would wade into that higher realm of thinking, which historically has been uniquely associated with human thinking. Other examples include personal optimizers which decide what activities a human should do, in what order, and with justifications, combined with task bots which then proceed to perform these activities. Using an earlier example, a task bot might write an essay using a knowledge bank of high quality essays to recreate a new essay of high quality. Now, technology would be dually capable of solutions which we would consider low hanging, and solutions we would consider the reserve of humans, in today’s world.

Leading on from this, the human fails to use the lower thinking skills and increasingly relies on technology to decide the higher realms of thinking. The thinking faculties become like unexercised muscles; weak and flabby, they deteriorate. This though assumes that there does not exist a higher level of thinking that we are currently unaware of. Qualitative changes tend to change the world in ways we may not be able to predetermine.

In conclusion, my position is should technology cross the qualitative boundary from increasingly solving low level tasks to increasingly solving high level tasks as we know them, the ability of humans to think for themselves will deteriorate, unless there exists an even higher level of thinking that today, we are unaware of.