More life-changing tech innovations needed – I

Let’s face it, for the past many decades there have been only a few innovations we can truly call revolutionary. Even decent evolutionary (incremental) developments are hard to come by these days. For the sake of our youth, adults need to pause once in a while to think of tech innovations that can truly contribute […]

Let’s face it, for the past many decades there have been only a few innovations we can truly call revolutionary. Even decent evolutionary (incremental) developments are hard to come by these days. For the sake of our youth, adults need to pause once in a while to think of tech innovations that can truly contribute to human civilisation. My concern is that the youth might think the technologies that dominate the news since they were born represent the desirable evolution of human civilisation, and therefore the ones that matter, and the ones to be pursued. The idea here is that “everyday technology” needs a big boost, beyond information and communication technologies (ICT). Unfortunately, many ICT ideas everywhere in the world – from the U.S to Nigeria, via China – focus on get-rich-quick schemes, at the expense of rigor. Classical examples of these kinds of technologies include Facebook and Twitter, which are almost useless within the framework of life-changing tech developments.
It is really lamentable that the Internet technologies represented by these two companies have generated so much attention and have brought in so much money, in tens of billions of U.S. dollars, for the founders. These financial incentives lure our youth away from truly revolutionary, or even life-changing incremental, technologies. While the tech peddled by Facebook and Twitter are useful in some very limited scope, they are not at all critical to our lives. Many people I know do not have Facebook pages, and some that do don’t work the pages anymore, or else they just dump pictures there for others to see. Useful, but not very!
That is, Facebook is absolutely dispensable, with little or no consequence for your lives. Meanwhile, according to the company, 1.59 billion users log on every month to Facebook, and the founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now the sixth richest person in the world at an estimated worth of $47 billion. Not bad for a peddler of mundane technology.
So then, what do I mean by real tech innovations? Examples include the development of the basic automobile, without which moving from one end of a country to another would take significant fraction of one’s life, plus the “wear and tear” on the body. Another example is the airplane, without which travel from one continent to another could require a lifetime. The development of heating and cooling systems is also revolutionary. Furthermore, imagine the number of lives that would have been lost to freezing weather in the olden days when the means of keeping warm was quite primitive. Inadequate cooling in scotching heat during an Olympic game in France was blamed for the death of hundreds of people. And let’s not forget the discovery of electric bulb by Thomas Edison, and let’s compare the lives in our villages, where there is no electricity, with those in the cities that do have electricity – the difference is as clear as darkness and light. It’s generally believed that a serious hindrance for a country like Nigeria to succeed in creating much tech development is deeply rooted in the absence of reliable power generation and distribution. The invention of the transistor (radio) and the computer also represents truly great human feat.
While Facebook or Twitter might not represent real tech innovations, Microsoft, Apple, and Google are a different story. Derived versions of ATT’s UNIX operating system formed the basis of the software engines that drive our PCs/Mac (Linux, Mac OS), and smartphones (Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS). Microsoft invented the software engines that drive PCs (Windows), and the productivity tools developed by the company are becoming inevitable for survival in business and in the office. So, in a sense, these companies have truly innovated and should represent examples that our youth should try to emulate and surpass.
The telltale of the level of a technology is the amount of effort that goes into creating it. That is, building something truly revolutionary requires a lot of sweat, and there is simply no way around that. If you are lazy or lack persistence, you will not accomplish much, no matter how intelligent you may be! You also need to be passionate about what you are developing. Take telephony/telegraph as an example. The folks, who laid down the transatlantic cables on ocean beds over a century or so ago, so we could have voice and data transfer across the Atlantic Ocean, spent many years of hard labor to accomplish this feat. Thomas Edison is known to have failed 10,000 times before he succeeded in developing the electric bulb. (Most people can’t even withstand a single failure, let alone 100 or 10,000!) Another telltale of truly desirable innovation is that it ultimately leads to something you can touch. That is, a physical object. Software can be great of course, but to really qualify as being revolutionary, the deprivation of a technology must lead to some real experience of pain.
This article continues next week.