Technology and the Gene for Minimizing Effort

There is something so natural, so obvious, that it's invisible. That something is our knee-jerk association of value with technology's promise of ease, speed, convenience, and power. Google the keywords "Made Easy" and you get more than 70 million hits. Substitute "Fast" and over 1.6 billion sites check-in. This paper questions the automatic tie-in of goodness with human effort removal. It launches on the late Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf's Principle of Least Effort as it bears on the evolution, marketing, use, and abuse of technology. In a world not designed for our convenience, it made perfect sense to preserve what was once precious - food energy. Since effort burns energy, there was survival value in discovering and incorporating technology that was effort efficient. Today, in a developed world transformed to the tune of us, a world where acquiring food is as hard as letting your GPS talk you to the nearest McDrive-Up window, the instinct is fast getting us into accelerating trouble. Making life a little easier thanks to a specific product, service, or technique, is not the problem. It's the sheer sum total. With so many things capitalizing on this ship-out-of-water instinct to minimize effort, individually and collectively, physically and mentally, we're losing it because we're not using it. Soaring obesity, a kind of inner global warming, in America especially, is one hard to dismiss signature of the loss. Unfortunately, there's more. Looking at the knee that jerked to the hammer of ease is a first step en route to putting order back into the technology with humans system where it belongs (in us).