What can you do with technology?

Growing up in the 1990s, the greatest innovators, at least from my perspective, were all the scientists who carried out research to come up with ground-breaking innovations. You could imagine these men and women in white lab coats hard at work doing research on how to solve the world’s problems. There wasn’t a computer class in my school at that time, so the most I knew about research and innovation was in my chemistry and physics classes, where I would often hear names of these scientists who had invented some amazing things.

Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, etc. were some of the innovators who would often be name-dropped during my classes. Technological innovations like the advent of WordPress, the creation of JavaScript, etc weren’t all that notable enough to make their creators popular worldwide, and even today, despite all the amazing things technology has done so far in terms of innovation, founders still go very much unrecognized. Someone like Bill Gates, who invented arguably the most useful tool in human history, the personal computer, is most popular for the money he made. Very few people know about the creator of the internet or the person who discovered microchips, simply because they might not have made the same amount of money.

Technology & Innovation

Even though it might be difficult to describe, technological advancements have moved humanity forward the most, in my opinion. It isn’t necessarily a comparison I am making with other fields like chemistry and physics, but I feel like based on our school systems, technology gets pushed to the background while having the most potential. The pace at which technological innovation moves is mind-blowing; it will take scientists decades to discover and understand something, while with the right instructions, it might just take a computer the better of a second to figure the same things out.

Enhancing our lives

From communication to daily tasks, passing through entertainment, learning, working, transport, and much more, technology has really touched every corner, and today it's difficult to find an area where technology can’t improve. Our reliance on technology has become nearly addictive; we really can’t do without it at this point. Can you really name an industry that doesn’t use technology of some sort? Maybe a few people are isolated somewhere on an island, but everything else is connected to technology in one way or another, and the driving force behind this technology is “a programming language."

Programming languages

The driving force behind every technology is what is known as an algorithm. This helps translate our human desires and wishes from our very limited physical body and mind into an electronic machine that has a more durable body and chipset. Before, to communicate, you would have to speak louder or carry a letter to the person you wanted to, but now a machine does that for you; it has both the resources and energy to scale that process infinitely and efficiently. Today, technology facilitates learning. Before, education would be passed down from one person to another with a lot of shortcomings, but this time around, the same information can be relayed flawlessly and more efficiently.

And it continues

It's scary and exciting at the same time to see how far technological innovation can go and all the things we will be able to do. Even right now, it is hard to conceive; we can only imagine the things we have seen in movies, but there is just so much more we haven’t even thought about yet. I don’t think people in the past could have imagined they would be instantly able to communicate with anyone across the globe, but today we can. Even now, it's difficult to imagine having internet unlimitedly anywhere in the globe, but with things like Starlink making that a reality already. Today, we are still reliant on transportation through roads and vehicles, but in the future that might become a thing of the past.

Our lives are constantly being disrupted at a mind-bending pace by technology; it's difficult to keep track of it all. One question which we have to answer is whether we are going in the right direction or the wrong one, because right now it feels like we are speeding down a hill and not quite sure of where we are going to land.

Thanks for reading ☺️

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