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).