Information technology and future
In the Industry Age, automation machines and robots have replaced manual jobs in manufacturing assembly lines. In the Information Age, software is changing many complex tasks and makes them more efficient. It is predicted in the next ten years, self-driving cars will take people from one place to another. For example you can use your smart phone to program where you want to go and send it to a taxi company, a taxi without a driver will arrive at your door to take you where you want to go and you can pay using your smartphone. No it is NOT science fiction. Self-driving car is already here and several taxi companies already invest in building thousands of them to be used soon. In the near future, flying drones will carry packages from the store directly to your home. For example, you go online and buy things via your tablet and the merchandise can be shipped to your house by a flying drone directly, before it arrive it will send you an email so you know when it will be there. No it is NOT fiction. Flying drones is already here and Amazon already builds hundreds of them to deliver light packages in some areas. In the near future, smartphone will also be your doctor as it will monitor your health, your heart rate, your blood glucose etc. to identify any anomaly and warn you about certain diseases. It also calls your doctor if it is emergency in case of heart attack or stroke too. No, it is not science fiction. The use of special health sensors has helped how biotechnology industry learns about the human body. Health monitoring system is already here and several companies already developed them for public usage. Today Google and Apple are the two biggest support of this technology and Samsung is reported to have a similar system.
With these new technologies, “new jobs” are created and “old jobs” are destroyed over time. The fact is technology is changing faster than some companies can adapt and leading to the emerging of powerful technology companies that control the market and the declining of companies that cannot change fast enough or cannot compete. Technology also creates a big gap in knowledge that divide the “Educated” and the “Lesser educated” or the “Winners” and “Losers” resulting in a small number of technologists and skilled workers that have very high earnings and a majority of people with lower paying jobs or without job. The advances in technology also disrupt the economy of some countries and change the power balance of the world.
Today technology is winning “the power of thinking” with the creation of super smart computers such as IBM’s Watson with its complex machine learning algorithms that beat the world’s greatest mind in “Jeopardy games” and IBM’s Deep Blue won the world’s chess champion few years ago. By using these technologies, people have fast access to information, making them more productive and allowing them to make faster, better decisions that lead to improved business performance. It is predicted that Big Data will become the key technology that changes everything in the next ten years. A scientist said: “Big data is the new Internet as it will change everything. When the Internet was created thirty years ago, no one could imagine its influence or what it did. The same thing can be said for the Big Data as only few people know of its impact. As information grows quickly, people are finding it is more difficult to manually analyze and store information fast enough. On average, it takes around 10,000 hours for a person to analyze a complex data, compared to a Big data system that can analyze complex data in few seconds. As a result companies have seen the demand for this technology growing over 100% in the next few years.
The accelerated advancements in technology have allowed more and more people to access shared information on the Internet compared to fifty years ago when only few scientists had access to these resources. According to Moore’s Law, computing processing power will double every two years which means that even the latest technology today will only last a few year as things will change with the newest technology. If you look back, you can see how technology has change over the years. Mainframe computer lasted 40 years but personal computer only lasted 20 years and now we have tablet and smart phones but these are being updated every six months, with new smartphones available every few weeks. What will be next? Many technologists think that within five years, smartphone will be replaced by “wearerable computer” such as the current smart watch and smart glass then smart clothes etc.
To continue innovating in the future, we must learn to work with technology. Technology has become a driver for business advantage and economic prosperity. It is very important for students to study technology to better yourself and your future. The future of a country belongs to the young and what they study and what they know will determine whether the country will thrive in this fast changing world or not.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
