Brief Overview/Summary:
- Novelty. Creative. Possibilities. Basically, this lesson showed us what is inconceivable in the last 10 years has become our reality, and what is impossible might just become our future!
- The 4 "smarts" : Smart people / Smart ideas / Smart money / Smart alliances and partnerships. Most great ideas never become reality due to a lack of smart money. Also, investor fatigue, sometimes the technology just takes too long to get innovated, and unless someone with deep pocket is willing to fund the project, it is most likely going to fail.
Interesting Observations and Ideas:
Some drivers for the development of emerging and future technologies:
- Unmet market opportunities
- Growing body of scientific and technological know-how.
- Supply can create demand or vice versa
- Mass media and advertising
- Confluence of the 4 "smarts"
One important question to answer is how emerging technologies will affect us: environmentally, socially and economically.
- With all the surveillance technology, how are we going to protect our 'privacy'. Has our privacy been invaded all this time? How well does your phone know you? Could this information be used against you? One interesting video you might want to watch will be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pYHN9iC9I
- We discussed about smart homes and how they are able to generate negative electricity bill. However, is the renewable energy hype all good and beneficial for an economy? One quick search on the Internet returned me with negative results! Take a quick look at this article, dated 24th September 2013, http://www.smartgridnews.com/artman/publish/Technologies_DG_Renewables/The-world-is-watching-The-German-revolt-against-renewables-6050.html#.UmU7-vkwqQw. "Der Spiegel claims German consumers will be forced to pay $26 billion for renewable energy in 2013. The same amount of electricity purchased on the market would have cost about $4 billion." While i do agree that in the long term, these renewable energies will be able to reap benefits from economics of scale but it is costing Germany too much money.
Key Takeaways:
- Sometimes, timing is crucial for certain technologies to take place. For example, my classmate presented on living underwater and I felt that this form of technology is not within our time and we should focus more on how to make sustainable living on land first.
- Imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.- Albert Einstein
Issues for further discussions:
- At the end of the lesson, Prof asked us how will we relate this question back to inequality faced in this world. Well, in my opinion, the poor will forever stay poor unless something breaks them out of their reality. Can this something be in a form of new technology? A person? An organization? For instance, while all the developed countries are searching for renewable energy and investing tons of money into research and development, what is countries like Papa new guinea doing? Quoting technological spillover is just too idealistic to appeal to me. Unless the government of these developing countries have a good sense of where the world is heading and tries to catch up, it is near impossible for them to achieve cargo goods similar to that of what whites have achieve.
Rating for lesson:
- I give this lesson a 10/10! Simply because of what Prof mentioned at the start of our lesson. Nothing is too crazy for our twc lesson. This really opened my eyes to adopting the 'why not' mentality!
Link back to the masterblog: http://twcshahi13.blogspot.sg/
My favourite TWC blog to read and check if i've missed out anything would be Sylvestor's blog: http://twcsylvesteryeo2013.blogspot.sg/
Cheers!
Cheers!
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