Still, there appears to be a fundamental contradiction within this particular point in this article, as there is in Turkle's. The following quotation from Slater's essay illustrates this point nicely. "How many people eat too much or don't eat enough or have some sort of a mental illness?" asks Thomas Gunderson, a health care analyst with Piper Jaffray & Co. "There's a big market out there." Yet as these devices proliferate, so too will the ethical issues that stick to them like barnacles… there continues to hover fears that DBS could…be used as a management device" (242). The paradoxical nature of both of these quotations, and the ideas that they represent, are fairly apparent. In the latter quotation, one of the marketing benefits of this form of brain surgery is that it can be used for a variety of ailments from too much weight, to too little weight, to mental conditions, to people who do not want to get out of bed on Mondays…The list is fairly limitless, as this procedure can be used to help people manage a variety of problems that are not even necessarily related. Yet this same management potential is also a source of fear, in the event that the management of the surgical devices will fall into the wrong hands and management will then become a euphemism for mind control. This conflicting notion is presented within Turkle's quotation as well, in which people seek a relief from the dizzying, disorienting encompassing nature of technology with more mature, serene, gentler technology -- in effect seeking a solution from the source of their problems. Due to the fact that the one common denominator or definition of humanity is that people are flawed (which was established in an earlier assignment), it can also be maintained that by...

To put all one's attempts in the click of a button or some other technological device is to not try (or exert ourselves) at all, and is certainly a way in which technology can make people less than human -- if we let it.
Therefore, in conclusion it should be noted that there are in fact many ways in which technology can make people less than human. It can make us overly lazy, it can make us reliant on the application, intrigue and labor of someone else instead of their own, and it can certainly isolate us to the point where we have so little truly intimate human contact to the point where we actually both fear it and desire some perverse assimilated form of it. But this is only it one allows this trend to continue and this decidedly unnatural occurrence to continue. The contrasting perspective of the respective authors of these works alludes to this fact. Turkle's essay largely warns of the dangers of technology overcoming humanity, or of human desire, emotions and needs being subservient to technology. Although there are some cautionary notes in Slater's work, her encouraging tone can be easily detected in her endorsement of technology as a saving grace and enhancement of human life. However, both of these essays allude to the fact that there is still a choice at this point, one which many people may not even be aware of. If we choose to fall into a technological, virtual world, we may do so. But if we choose to remain in the sensory, vivid, natural world of emotional highs and lows, we had better make an effort to do so now and embrace the triumphs and terrors of what it truly means to…