What is happening with technology?
This is the major question that many are wondering. The impact is being seen in many areas although, the majority of society, is not paying attention. Following technological trends is not something people pay much attention to. They go about their business focusing upon what is important to them.
Unfortunately, all are going to feel the impact of what is happening. This is nothing new since we saw it many times before. We will explain how this works in this article.
There is one thing that is different as compared to the past. We are seeing things going at a pace never seen before.
Technology's Impact On Society Goes Through Cycles
It is easy to overlook the impact upon technology on society since it is not spread evenly. By this I mean that technology advances at a steady pace. The difference is that we see the effect on society occur at an uneven pace.
This is something that I researched going back to the 1860s.
What we see is that every 20 years, society goes through a period where technology makes a difference. So while we see advancement consistent in things such as compute, until it appears in products and services, it goes unnoticed.
For the sake of brevity, we will concentrate our discussion on the last 40 years. There are enough examples to reveal how this is going to unfold.
Again, the biggest difference is the pace at which things are moving.
2040 Will Resemble 2000
I recall people saying, shortly before COVID, that the technology thing was nonsense since "after all, things were not that much different since 2000". This is a statement that I cannot argue with.
What I can say is nobody stood in 2000 and said, "you know, things haven't changed that much since 1980". Nobody in their right mind thought that.
The world experienced a huge shift in the developed countries. If you consider what life was like in an office in 1980, there were no copy machines. Carbon paper was still used in typewriters, that is how copies were made. The only way to take a message was to write it down since voice mail was not a service at that time. Even answering machines were rarities.
Of course, documents were pieces of paper and storage were metal file cabinets. Facsimile machines were also not commonplace.
In short, the world was physical and analog. Computers were used by the biggest of companies. This was before personal computers and in home gaming systems.
Fast forward 20 years, we were in the cell phone (albeit dumb) era. The Internet was in most offices and many homes. video arcades were a thing of the past as in-home gaming systems took over.
Just look at some of the technologies that came about during that period:
- personal computers
- cable television
- digital cameras
- cell phones
- the Internet
- Windows
- The Internet
- MP3 Players
- DVDs
- VCR
These completely altered how we conducted our personal and business lives. It also had huge effects on different industries. We know the disruption that was caused during this era.
A Drop In The Bucket
We have to remember that more than 20 years passed since 2000.
This means that we are dealing with capabilities far in excess of what we were dealing with back then. That means we are going to see a couple decades of advancement that far surpass what we saw in the 1980s. In other words, nobody is going to stand in 2040 and say that society really hasn't changed.
At this point, it is rather difficult to project what life will be like in the late 2030s.
Let us consider some of these technologies:
- artificial intelligence
- robotics
- nuclear fusion
- solar
- 3-D printing
- spatial computing and mixed reality
- quantum technologies
- materials sciences
- bio-tech
We could see most industries altered. Manufacturing, construction, retail, transportation, finance, and medicine are some of the most obvious areas that we are already seeing progress.
Spatial computing is one idea that is gaining a bit of traction. It is the merging of the digital and physical world. We can view this as the next step in storage and search.
Consider what was filed 40 years ago. In that era, paper was placed in a manila folder and placed in a metal filing cabinet. Eventually, for firms that had a lot of paper, they files were moved to off-site storage.
The digital world brought us the storage of electronic files. This could be local like on a PC or on the cloud. Going further out, we have the storage of all files that make up the Internet. We use search to find what we need.
With spatial computing, everything in our physical realm is filed. Having sensors in everything means that we have the ability to search our physical realm the same as we do our hard drives.
We are going to see the digitizing of objects, connect then via the cloud, and allow sensors and motors to react to one another. It is a digital representation of the real world.
The last 15 months saw massive improvements in chatbots. Robotics are forging ahead with new announcements each week. Manufacturing and construction is going to be radically altered over the next 5 years.
Technology is going to impact things in ways that we have difficulty imagining. This is going to be a wild ride.