Technology and World Change - Week 10

Today’s lesson was about Emerging and future technologies. When Prof mentioned about walkman, then I realized that it has never occurred to people in the past that they would need such a technology. They usually just stick with the old type of radio which is bulky and big in size. It will be normally placed at homes and not having the ability to be brought around unless it is needed. However, this initial technology sparked an idea to the innovators to make the radio/ music to be easily portable. This is how MP3 is formed and it has now become a necessity for all. Innovators now make use of human’s wants and transformed it into a need, a product of necessity. 

Another form of innovation was robotics. In order to lessen human workload, robots were created to perform task accordingly to how it was program to achieve the same results as humans. And with the presence of advance technology, robots can now perform task more effectively than humans at a shorter period of time, some even error- free.

During one of the presentations in class, one of the classmates presented on nanotechnology and how it was being able to regenerate cells in such a way that cancer could be cured and patients will enjoy the privilege of anti- aging. However, with such technology I believe that they will be high chances of malfunction as well. When such nanotechnology malfunction in our body, wouldn’t it cost more than the initial cure as well as more complicated procedure in retrieving it out of the body? This will in turn cause harm to the patients instead of bringing advantages to them. 

Another presentation mentioned about EEG, the technology that enables us humans to control the computer games with our minds. This makes me think the functions of such technology. Even if it will be able to work, we human s tend to multi task and it would not be possible for such technology to perform all task at once of it will cause the system to crash in no time. Other than that, with our ability to use our minds to control things like “Matilda”, what about the privacy issues that one will face? Some of the thoughts and things that we wish to do will be executed even before we can stop it in time. Imagine you have the ability of controlling things and there was this once when a person agitated you that you wish to bring him to bang the wall. This will happen within seconds and would cause unwanted death. So now, what is so good about such technology?

I would rate this lesson 8/ 10 as it brought me to a brand new world of new technologies that
I have not been exposed to and it make me feel that anything can be made possible in the near future.