Please rate this according to the SAT standards if possible. I'd like to know what this essay would deserve out of a 6.
Thanks!
As technology becomes increasingly powerful, the question of its virtues will no doubt come into question. Yet it is not, as many claim, a question of power, but one of our own ability to control it. Knowledge can be a burden, but not if we can full be in control of its consequences.
Google Glass (glasses that let you record everything you see) and its run-in with child pornography laws are a clear example of when knowledge's consequences have overpowered our ability to control them. A huge criticism of Google Glass are that if a witness sees a child being molested, rather than call the police, he/she will likely try to delete evidence of said rape, because as the video taken by his glasses would be saved onto Google's servers, he could be convicted of distributing child porn. Google Glass is an extremely innovative technology, yet we're unable to control its consequences -- making it a burden, in this case, for the child being raped.
Another instance of this is when the US dropped a nuclear bomb on top of Hiroshima and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. From the standpoint of this prompt and thesis, the issue isn't so much that we killed so many people as it is that President Truman later claimed he wasn't aware so many people would die. It's the fact that we weren't fully aware of the consequences of our power/knowledge. And indeed we weren't: radiation from the bomb lingered around for another fifty or so years, causing cancer in many survivors of the war and their descendents. The bomb itself was a technology that we knew how to create, but didn't know how to control, and Japan severely felt its consequences.
One popular criticism of my thesis is that because man created said technologies, we also have the power to control/destroy them. This type of statement, however, is esoteric and serves no meaningful purpose. Yes, in terms of absolute potential, we are capable of taking apart and throwing away these technologies. The problem lies not in that, but in the fact that humans often are so motivated by progress that they fail to consider the consequences of these technologies. When the shotgun was first popularized, the number of civilian deaths skyrocketed, because people were so excited by this new technology that they failed to think about its overall consequences. Thus, the problem of knowledge being a burden lies in the fact that we aren't always responsible or wise enough to utilize them beneficially to society.
As we move into the 21st century, no doubt new technologies will spring up. I only hope we'll have a handle on them, before we cause another Hiroshima or rape controversy.
i would give it a 4.
pros:
good information
concise
cons:
a few grammatical and spelling mistakes
for a good SAT essay you need to state the thesis or the topic from the question in the first paragraph and show your opinion on the piece of information that you get after the question while ending your essay, that is where you lost 2
if you have followed the given time limit, you are on the right pace. as you know timing is the most important thing in the SAT and most students don't get to complete the essay (leave aside the mistakes). so keep an eye on that.
