Study Journal 7

~ God has given us technology to further the work. Almost everything can be used to hasten it.
~ With the world moving online, most contact opportunities are online as well.
~ If the quality of relationships goes down as people move online, it'll be harder to get other people interested in the Gospel though...
~ But it has become much easier for people who are interested to find good information on their own.
~ There's still a lot of tech work to do when it comes to languages. We'll probably have official translators for a long time, but the throughput could be so much quicker.
~ It's awesome that church references are so easy to find and search through now.

~ Storing a universal family tree is a good step in the right direction. Before, it would have been way too easy for people to continue the same line independently.
~ The efficiency of family history work has skyrocketed.
~ But it requires a comfortability with working on computers. It's usually not to tough to start now.

~ Current technologies have continually increasing potential to keep people living in the fake worlds. This will never end.
~ But people who resist could use the tech for more good than was previously possible.
~ Relationships on the internet can be easy to invest in, but they won't ever pay off.

Blog Post 5

The internet has had an incredible effect on the efficiency of church work. Family history work in particular has had a huge boost. It's much easier for people to split the work for a single line because the church has created a single family tree and collaboration between people has become much easier. It's now potentially possible to do in 15 minutes what used to take 100 hours of research, and it's much more likely no one else is spending the same amount of time on the exact same question. But along with the productivity boost, the internet has even more potential for distraction. We can now be more productive than any other time in history, or we can be the most distracted. Technology has actually provided an opportunity to be both, but this would still be a waste of potential.

Blog Post 4

The question of entertainment is generally pretty easy to answer. If something can rejuvenate you without later detracting from real world experiences or creating an addiction, it seems to be a pretty good thing. Those requirements have to be looked at honestly in each individual circumstance, but it would be hard to argue against an entertainment wherein each was satisfied.

I can imagine those requirements being blurred in the future. Imagine a virtual reality system indistinguishable from our real world. How can we say that living in the real world is better than living in the virtual one? Now imagine that the real world has no way to employ the vast majority of the populace because nearly every job has become cheaper to implement with a machine, including decision-making jobs typically thought impossible for them (this will happen long before realistic virtual reality). Say the virtual reality has a fulfilling job for everyone. The food tastes better. There are no physical risks. You can meet people similar to you or very different from you at your whim, at any time, and immediately. This means relationships could become richer than reality in the virtual world. Empirically, the people who tend to spend most of their time in the virtual world become healthier and happier without exception. Wouldn't it become unethical to discourage people from living in the virtual world?