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A question I forgot to answer during our introductory class is, “What is technology to me?” My insights on the question, “What do I think about the future?” relates to this. I treat technology like a boyfriend. There are times when IT is my master and there are times when IT is my slave. I prefer to see it as a give and take relationship, where one benefits from the other. We’re co-dependent. I’ll find it hard to live without it, and I suppose it wouldn’t work so well without me.

I see, however, a future where people will stop thinking for themselves and let technology do the work. While technology may have become everyone’s tool, it seems like more and more people will be helpless without it. I use Visio to do my process flows; I don’t have to think about what symbols to use in the flow charts because it’s all there. I use my cell phone for coordinating with colleagues, especially when I’m marshaling a tournament in some far-flung place. I use emails, my websites, and my online forums to submit marketing kits, proposals, and coordinate/evaluate bug testers’ reports. In short, I cannot imagine my life without technology. I could, but it would probably take me weeks to finish what I can normally do in a day.

The only part of my work where technology seems inept is when I am dealing with what I call KorEngrish scripts. I suspect these are Korean text that had been haphazardly run through some translating machine, which would result in badly mangled English translations that I have to edit manually. I believe that even if some genius managed to create software that could tell the difference between an individual Korean character and that same Korean character combined with two or more characters, he would still have to update his software bi-annually. This is because language evolves just as swiftly as technology does. I mean, what simply meant “happy” a few years ago means “homosexual” now. There would be instances from which the human element could never be removed.

I fear, however, that there will be only a handful of people that can recognize this. What if the time comes when people could no longer tell good from bad grammar? Would they be satisfied with just running KorEngrish text through some dumb machine translator and be done with it? What if Visio becomes even more powerful that they’d come up with more complicated templates for corporate procedures? The world would be run by a few intellectual beings able to control technology while the rest would be content with whatever technology is handed onto them — drones to the Queen Bees. My worst case scenario is this: Everyone who hasn’t the capacity to think for himself will be obsolete and be replaced by the one thing that they’ve become dependent on — technology. But that’s just me. Perhaps the horror stories of customers arguing with call center reps about their computers not working, when the reason was simply that the machines were unplugged, had gotten to me.