Okay so.. today's topic is Technology Assessment and Forecasting; Developing a Framework for
Understanding What Comes Next. Basically this is a continuing lesson from last week's lesson on future technologies. This lesson is discussing what are the "impossible" technology that can actually be made possible in say in 10 or 20 years. As with one of my favorite quotes, "We are only limited by our own imaginations." Many technologies are either already there or just need longer period of time to research and improve on. We looked at a couple of things that could actually surface in the next maybe 5-10 or 20 years.
One particular technology is augmented reality. With technology evolving such as iPhone, we have come to a stage where we can actually use our phones to scan our location or barcodes. Scanning of barcodes allow us to check prices online and in other departmental stores. An interesting thing is there is actually an innovative idea used in Japan where people can buy stuffs in the subway by scanning the item's code using their smartphones. Payments will be made and the item would be delivered right to their doorsteps supposedly in about 15mins time. As this particular technology gradually comes into use, it could reduce rental costs as people just need to showcase what item they have for most products. They don't have to display them and saves lots of space too. As this technology continues to evolve and be exploited, we could have some portable device that makes use of augmented reality and contains all our cards like ez-link card, credit card, or even "house keys"if next time we use scanning method instead of the traditional lock and key method to secure our homes.
Another technology coming is artificial intelligence. A particular part we touched on regarding artificial intelligence is on robots. Robots have been anticipated for a long time now and it seems to be emerging pretty soon. As discussed in the last lessons, Japan's solution to their decreasing population is the use of robots, estimating to use more than 3million robots to take over simple tasks in the next 5-10 years. My personal thought is that robots are cool, they can help us do simple tasks in everyday life and will have other functions such as in "SIRI" in the new iphone 4S where it can help us to send messages or to make reservations. However, there are problems like some people may use them as destructive tools. In addition, I believe we'll be quite not used to robots in our lives and meeting robots out on the street when robots are just incorporated into our everyday lives. Artificial Intelligence is continuously improving over the years and it is going to surpass human brain someday. I wonder if that is good or bad.
We spent some time in the class talking about impossible technology prediction in the past. One particular technology that caught my interest is the art of teleportation. It is one of the most desired technology most people in a developed country would want, especially in Singapore. With the population growing, buses and mrts are overly crowded especially during the peak hours. If you drive in a car, the road conditions are just as bad during the peak hours. Imagine if teleportation is made possible, imagine the time saved. Not only we no longer need to squeeze with other people on the buses or mrts, we actually can spend the time saved on other things. My personal thought on this is the majority of us spend an average of 2hours traveling daily, 1 hour to and 1 hour fro. That is nearly 10% of our lifetime. If we live to 90 years old, we would have spend about 9 years traveling. Not forgetting about 7 hours sleeping which translate to about 1/3 of our lives sleeping which using the same 90 years old lifespan, we spend 30 years sleeping. 30+9=39 years out of 90 years pretty much wasted. Not a pretty picture but yes that's a fact. Hence, teleportation is one of the top few things on the technology I want most. The time saved would be really precious and we would have significantly more time daily to do the things we want.
Overall, today we also viewed many videos, mostly short clips but all the same, the videos are interesting too. Today's lesson is pretty good except I would probably like more discussions, more actual views that people may have. More discussions in class would be good. I rate this class 8.5/10.
Cheers. :)
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