The Loss of Humanity in the Era of Advanced Technology Depicted in Two Dystopian Short Stories: Ken Liu’s “The Perfect Match” and Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52217/ksatra.v4i2.914Keywords:
Dystopian Literature, Humanity, Human-Tech RelationAbstract
Technology in the digital era creates many opportunities for mankind to make people's life easier. However, the presence of technology creates danger, such as hoaxes, fraud, and data stealing. While at a glance it looks like exaggerated anxiety, unchecked technology will lead to humans without humanity in the near future. With such thought in mind, this paper analyzes two dystopian short stories that focus on how very advanced technology can bring apocalyptic consequences to people’s humanity. First, Ken Liu’s “The Perfect Match” discusses how technology controls our life in the form of AI that monitors everything we say and do, thus, it eliminates the need for humans to think for themselves as the AI will do such process. Second, Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” examines the same topic about the marvel of technology in the form of a nursery room, eliminating the need for parents to take care of their children as they are already taken care of by the machine. By employing the qualitative research method, this study concludes that the very advanced technology can be a trigger for the loss of humanity that we know of as both dystopian stories provide the what-if scenario should the growth of technology is left unchecked.
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