Reporting Live From Tomorrow By Daniel Gilbert Summary

Technology and Happiness

People are rarely able to predict with any accuracy between how they will feel in the future, and so are often quite wrong about what will make them happy. Thus, when people meet problems, they always ask someone else to give them opinions. In the essay “Reporting Live from Tomorrow”, Daniel Gilbert suggests that beliefs, just like genes, can be “super-replicators”, given to spreading regardless of their usefulness. Thus even beliefs that are based on inaccurate information can provide the means for their own propagation. Finally, he finds people just want to get happiness from beliefs. Moreover, as the advent of science era, technology works as a surrogate to help people solve problems and get happiness. In the essay

Finally, he realizes technology makes people lose the ability to create happiness. As a result, although technology helps people make better decisions and improves their living conditions, it makes people lose the creativity and imagination to achieve happiness.

Although advanced technology acts as a surrogate that helps people make better decisions and saves their time; it distracts them from the everyday reality of life. Individuals face large quantities of problems in their whole lives, but they always get help from others. By contrast, if people try to solve every problem by themselves, they will waste a lot of time. Gilbert illustrates the situation as, “One of the benefits of being a social and linguistic animal is that we can capitalize on the experience of others rather than trying to figure everything out for ourselves”(211). People get benefits from communicating with others, because they share their knowledge and experiences with others. As a result, when they meet problems, they can use others’ experiences to get solutions. By contrast, if people do not talk with others, they have to solve problems by themselves at the expense of wasting a lot of time. Most people never

There is no perfect belief in the world, but once they can lead people to better lives, then people will pass them to others. Gilbert explains how the imperfect beliefs work as, “False beliefs that happen to promote stable societies tend to propagate because people who hold theses beliefs tend to live in stable societies, which provide the means by which false beliefs propagate”(214). Initially, only a few people know it when a false belief first comes out. Once the belief has a positive effect on people, they will still pass it to others, even if they know the belief is false. In the end, most people accept the belief because they can get benefits from it. Money is one of the best examples to illustrate it. When people are very poor, they will try their best to get rid of it. However, people still work hard to earn money even if they are not poor any more. The rich people are not happier than people who have normal salaries, because earning more money means more work and less free time. By contrast, the people who have normal salaries only need to finish their tasks. People believe earning more money can make them happier. Obviously, the belief is not true because earning more money means more work and less free time. However, once people think they have enough money and stop working, there will be no labor in the market. Finally, the economy will break down