Does it require effort and courage to make things simple?

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I cannot concur with this assertion if standing in the field of information technology. For most of IT products, users tend to require more friendly accesses. In other words, to make it easier to and simpler. However, in engineering respect, to achieve this requirement does not mean to make things simpler, it usually requires more researching in more extensive techniques and higher knowledge.

For most of computer technology, users tend to continuously demand a series of powerful functions to facilitate the efficiency for problem solving. For example, long time ago, keyboard is the only one input device. Nowadays, in addition to keyboard, new input technologies have had been developed, such as mouse, voice recognition and so on. In this case, for the purpose of increasing the accessibility, scientists had taken a long time and striving to improve the input methods for computer. And then new functions are appended on computer. I do not believe such expansion could be easily accomplished by any people who are not professional in this field.

Also, it is not easy to make a system or an application complex. Operation systems or applications, for example, take a long time to develop from a command line interface to a graphic user interface (GUI). Nowadays, most of operation systems or applications in main stream usually are featured with friendly and instinctive operation interface, which make them can be operated easier. But, does it mean those software are becoming simpler? Absolutely not! To meet these demands, more complex system architectures are required necessarily.

Furthermore, another example is “computer network”, which could lend more credence to support my opinion. In recent years, internet has rapidly extended, more and more contents or media has been added in. People benefited greatly from such a simple way of communication and knowledge exahange. However, this extraordinary achievement comes from many efforts and breakthroughs. It requires that scientists provide technological solutions to connect each network from worldwide networks. And it also requires that arts or experts continuously provide novel information and media to rich internet world.

Finally, by scrutinizing the second sentence of this assertion carefully, it raised an interesting question: does it require any effort and courage to make things as simple as possible, in other words, to adopt the lifestyle of our cave-dwelling ancestors. In my opinion, our modern society evolved from agriculture society, a simple lifestyle, to industry and business society, a complex lifestyle. It took our ancestors several thousand years to struggle for a better institutions and technology. Therefore, it would be surprised that their descendants actually want to abandon such valuable achievements, as this assertion’s idea: to make things as simple as possible.

To sum up, those complex technologies we use everyday are the combination from many person’s efforts. Also, such achievements usually call for the courage to risk fail. In order to sustain these advances, we have to either make a “real effort” to keep pace with the development of technology and have a “real courage” to create a better lifestyle for next generation.