Technology and World Change Lesson 10

"It is said that the present is pregnant with the future."-Voltaire

This quote is one that I find most vivid and a rather accurate depiction of the future. Today's lesson was about understanding the future from trends that we have in the present and developing a framework moving forward as to how we would go about predicting the future. There was some discussion about the aspects of the framework and some of the challenges that we would face with the accuracy of such a method as well as its social, political and economic implications.

Interesting Observations/Ideas

One of the interesting observations and ideas I had from the session was the video about Steve Tighe on how strategic foresight is the next business frontier. Here he actually suggested there may not be a need to use historical data to interpret the future and it would be better to work back from the future to help the company innovate and function better. He also pointed out that in fact working from the present forces them to see all the stumbling blocks which would in turn make them fail. This is following the ideology of thinking of problems and how to solve them rather than looking just at the situation and thinking of how to improve the current situation.

Another interesting observation that I had was that of gaming as a viable solution for technology forecasting which I did not think was even possible to begin with. Gaming can be used to simulate the entire possible future world and then it can be used to assess what will changing a certain factor or variable lead to. However, this may not be 100% accurate because any model is only as accurate as the numbers and formula that is used to  generate it and as this is based on projections it may not be completely accurate.

Key Takeaways
One of my key takeaways was that of the drivers for technology assessment and forecasting.
I have included it here for reference along with some explanations for the various key points.

Drivers for Technology Assessment and Forecasting

• Exponential growth in the range of new technologies with potential world changing significance
• The need to gain an understanding of what kinds of change a new technology innovation might bring – in economic, social, ethical/legal, environmental and other terms
•  The need to prioritize in deciding whether and when to invest in research and development of new innovations and technologies
• The need to prioritize, given limited resources, on whether and when to implement and use new innovations and technologies – especially in developing countries. (The time and resources at your disposal is important, if limited cash and time; short term is good. Otherwise, long term investments is good.)

Another key takeaway I had was that technological assessment and forecasting can have adverse consequences. This included the dilemma on whether or not to stop a technology from being developed if it is known that it has adverse consequences, something which I still have not reconciled with myself due to its immense ethical issues.

Another key takeaway that I had was that of the difficulty in prioritisation. It may be important to develop future technologies to stay ahead but it may not be feasible to spend important resources on developing future technology which we have no idea of its success when there are many more pressing problems that we are facing currently such as world hunger and the lack of access to clean water and sanitation in some of the poorest countries in the world. It is also not wise to completely not look into future technology as this will cause the country to fall behind. It is about finding that balance, something that may be essentially difficult to achieve.

Issues for discussion
One of the issues I felt could be raised for discussion would be how accurate such predictions could be even based on the amount of information that we amassed related to the topic, as a result of singularity, there could be new information being produced everyday which would change the way the prediction would be as it would have to be constantly recalculated in light of the new information. Moreover, there are numerous other factors that could affect the final result between now and the time in which the prediction can verified which would substantially question the accuracy of such predictions.

Another issue which I felt could be raised for discussion would be that of which of the methods used in predictions could be said to be the most effective in producing the most accurate prediction? It is definite that the different methods must be used in conjunction and a decision is made on the totality of the evidence but it is also necessary to evaluate the various methods of predictions to see which one is the most useful to refine the method of predictions to that of the most streamlined and accurate prediction framework possible.

Responses to the presentations
I had my individual presentation this week and it was very enjoyable to be able to share my ideas on Technological forecasting and its impacts with the class. I would like to thank the class for being such a great audience and for participating in the mini experiment that I tried to conduct at the beginning of my presentation. I thought that the implications on the social, political drivers and emerging technologies were the most exciting parts of the article and I was glad to be able to present that to the class.


My classmate and groupmate LingZhen also raised a question which was whether we thought that 1 degree celsius increase in the global temperature levels could really affect the world. As the world is made up of a lot of intricate interconnecting processes are are all interdependent, any slight change in any one of this processes could cause a wide-ranging effect much less a whole 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures. This means that every little thing that we do can have a very large contributory effect to the world at large and it is important to think of how we can minimise our environmental impact and ecological footprint as much as possible.


Personal ratings for the session
When I heard that this was to be my presentation topic I was intially quite confused because I had no idea of what the topic entailed. It seemed very wide and all encompassing which made it quite difficult to find a jumping off point. After going through my research and through this lesson with Professor Shahi I was amazed and enlightened as to the extent to which the future could be predicted and the ideas on how to structure a prediction. I would definitely like to try planning my own prediction in the future. I found this lesson very enlightening which will go a long way in helping me structure my own prediction for the technology of the future.


I would rate this lesson an 8/10.

Next week, we will be going through the presentations that the different groups have prepared on future technologies on their webpage. This definitely promises to provide a different persepctive to the way I  look at the world today and my projections for its future and using the frameworks that I have learnt today, I am excited to see how next week's lesson will be.

Cheers,
Amanda Tan