Session 9 - Emerging Technologies

This week we were exposed to a bunch of emerging technologies which are more emerged than emerging really. We were thrown into the deep end of this brave new world when Prof showed us the video on Claytronics (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcaqzOUv2Ao). He also showed us videos on plastic electronics, augmented reality and on AI. In fact the AI video was on the creation of a 'perfect woman', who has been designed for a projected market of millions of lonely men. All of these fantastic ideas drew me to a rather frightening and humbling realization.

I have realised through the breadth of this course that my generation is at the cusp of an immensely important time in the history of human kind. Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying that there haven't been people who didn't have immense responsibilities on them. But a certain mix of circumstances have linked our future actions much more inextricably with that of the earth and the entire human race. These circumstances are -

1. The rise of triple convergence and globalisation (From the World is Flat, a highly recommended read)

2. An impeding non renewable energy crisis, shown by the fact that peak oil and peak coal may have been reached.

3. A shift in global power after almost 500 years from West to the East.

4. The near exponentioal rate of growth of science and technology which is leading to a singularity.

5. The Internet which is now bringing people together at an ever increasing rate.

Of course there are other factor that are contributing to this situation, but my basic idea remains the same.

It is up to us now to handle this situation the best we can. We can allow ourselves to ride on this wave of emerging technology and let it carry us where it will. Or we can manage innovation and lead it in the way that is the most beneficial for mankind.

And lead it we shall. The efforts of my fellow students in this class have convinced me that we are going in the right direction. And I hope that the time to come will be a good one.

One emerging technology that I want to talk about is synthetic biology. I came across this while researching my presentation. It's basically making new life by using tools developed and discovered while doing traditional genetic engineering. I won't tell you too much about it because I'm trying to understand it myself, but i'll say that this is something that might make biology the science of this century. Check out this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niQ0kkgPxJk&feature=related. Andrew Hessel who is a professor at Singularity University talks about synthetic biology.

I'd rate this session a 9.

Session 8

This session we got into one of the most important topics that have been discussed in this class, energy. Our civilisation, our entire way of being is dependent almost entirely on the quality and quantity of energy that we use. Wars have been fought, countries torn apart, governments overthrown all for the need of energy.

The first thing that really caught my eye was the fact that we were once completely dependent on renewable energy aka wood. It it interesting to note that our energy needs have sky rocketed in the past 200 years. The last 200 years have also been the golden age of technology and to a lesser extent science. Rapid strides in scientific knowledge and technical know-how has exponentially increased our energy needs. An ever growing population hasn't exactly helped.

However science has also provided us more efficient ways of using energy, preventing a Malthusian end to our existence. However scientists postulate that we have reached the peak of the non renewable energy usage. Basically its all downhill from here.

However one of the key points I have taken away from this class can be applied here. A leader looks at adversity and see opportunity and that is what is happening. Opportunities exist in the production of transport, solar cells etc which use clean energy. An example is Shai Agassi, a man who quit a highly lucrative career at SAP AG, to start a company called Better Place which innovates in alternative energies for transport and electric cars. I'll post his blog and TED speech on the FB page.

Another interesting idea was the development of a prize for innovation in clean energies. Two prizes like this exist, the Zayed Future Energy Prize (http://www.zayedfutureenergyprize.com/) and the MIT Clean Energy Prize(http://mitcep.com/)

I would rate this session a 9.

Session 7

This week we talked more about Bio-Business. We were talked mainly about agriculture and issues such as world hunger, food security and biotechnology. The prof also reiterated his point about the classification of opportunities. He talked about the summit, valley and cloud opportunities. It came to mind that we are looking at the summit of one of the greatest opportunities in agribiology and agriculture. In the next 20-25 years we will have to increase our food production substantially to care of burgeoning population needs. However we have the capability now to feed 10 billion people but to due to poor change management we haven't been able to take advantage of it.

In keeping with this point, the paper that really caught my eye was Ending World Hunger by Norman Borlaug. The point he made ties up with that of disruptive innovation in week 6. People don't accept change because it would require them spending money, time and energy in understanding the implications and requirements of the new technology. And that brings us to where we always been at, the fact that change management and change leadership are almost as integral as the development of the technology that causes that change. In the future we must look to people to push disruptive innovation until it becomes the market norm.

Also there was this debate about vegetarian vs non vegetarian food. And also the prof also told us about food that is made from faeces. He talked about how they can make vegetarian food taste and look like non veg and how it can be genetically engineered to give the same nutrients present in non veg food such as proteins etc. Again I think the acceptance of food such as this depends on the marketing and the development of the product, which takes us back to the idea of change management.

Food security was also of the major points that was discussed in the class. I think that the definition of food security needs to be amended. We need to think about food security in terms of self sufficiency. The world is becoming an increasingly urban place and we need to think about food in terms of being self sufficient, even in urban areas. And the technologies that we talked about in class such as microbe manufacturing etc.

The key take aways in this class would be the ideas about world hunger and the green revolution as given by norman borlaug, the wonderful presentations the ideas on food security. I did not know that the world food situation was so volatile and will try to contribute at a personal level as much as possible.

I rate the session a 8/10.

Session 6

In this session we discussed bio business and talked about how technology and issues such as healthcare, genetic engineering are linked. We discussed topics such as the Life Sciences and talked about other things in bio business. One of the things that really struck me was how technology driven the field of biology has become as shown by the number of patents granted in the last few years. The prof talked about how science of biology has experienced a paradigm shift in its method of study and development, It has now become a technology driven science, with technology both being used to study and technology being developed as a result of this study.

The real interesting stuff that hit me during this class was from one of the readings. The concept of disruptive innovation really caught my eye because it speaks volumes about people's attitude towards change. Once in a while you come across innovations that can really change the way people do things. These are the kind of developments which change things at a basic level. And this is why change like this is rejected by people. Most people are slaves to routine and normality. This makes unreceptive to change that might disturb this sense of normality. I think this deals a lot with change management and how leaders introduce people to change.

Key take aways should be the realisation that biology is now a technology intensive science and should be viewed as such. It is filled with opportunities as discussed by prof and it's applications in areas such as agriculture and healthcare makes it a very good social investment.

I would have liked to discuss healthcare in developing countries and how we can provide healthcare and bring innovation in this to these places. We have home grown innovators in developing countries such as India who can drive change but they need leadership. Healthcare, sanitation and family planning are huge issues in these countries and as such we could have discussed possible solutions.

I would rate the session 9 on 10.

Session 5

Information Technology has become an indispensable part of our lives. It is so integral to our way of living that we take for granted what it has done for us. I recently bought myself the new iPhone and have been using it for fun and games. But what the class made me realize was that a technology like the iPhone could actually make it possible for anyone, anywhere to get themselves education and information. Till now I had only focused on IT that changed how I did things. But after this I understand that ICT can be a driver of change, change which can actually help people raise their quality of life.

The basic themes discussed in class were what ICT is, what are its implications and possible uses for the future. Also we discussed its dangers and other problems connected to it. We also mentioned possible application it might have in dealing with social problems such as poverty and unemployment.

One part that I really enjoyed was the one on Cloud Computing. The video was very good and I really grasped the concept well because of it.

A thought that came to me was that the root cause of most of these problems is a lack of information. Unemployment is partially caused by lack of knowledge of opportunities. Poverty can be caused by lack of knowledge of how to use resources. Illiteracy is caused by lack of teachers and infrastructure. All of these problems can be solved through the proliferation of information technology. I mentioned the MIT Media Lab's one hundred dollar laptop, which could be a tool for solving these problems.

Another thought I had is related to the story of the Tower of Babel. Our world for a lot of recorded human history has been divided by culture, geography and language. However with the advent of the Internet we are again reverting to what we were before the Tower of Babel. We are no longer divided by geography, no longer split asunder by language. We speak the language of 1's and 0's, experience each other's lives through blogs and social networking and live the same culture through sites like 4chan, Facebook, youtube etc.

I would rate the lecture 9/10 for some very interesting presentations and good insights into how IT works.

Eye Openers

Something really jumped out at me during this second session. The Millennium Development Goals surprised me with the very magnitude of what they were trying to achieve. One of the important points we have to take away from this course is how technology can help us to change the world and make it a better place. Items such as the MIT Media Lab's 100 dollar laptop have the ability to make the Millennium Development Goals a reality. We see how this marvel of modern technology can actually make us realize a better tomorrow.

The things we discussed in class such as the dominance of certain countries and companies due to their technological superiority really brought to the fore why certain organisations are leaders in their respective fields. Also the rising and falling star framework put into perspective the socio economic changes of the past few years. We can understand very easily the future dominance of the South East Asian region in the coming years by looking through this framework.

I really enjoyed the presentations especially the ones about the American hegemony and Ford's assembly line. I think the second one showed how technology can play a part in world politics while the second one showed us how one organisation can simply change the way that everyone does things.

Key take away points would be the MDG's and how we can work to solve them. Also I'll take away the the realization of how big a role technology can play at both the macro and the micro level, of how it can change a daughter's life as Dora talked about in her presentation and of how it can change the way that nations progress as talked about in the first presentation. In fact this is an issue for further discussion.

I would rate the session 9 because of the brilliant presentations and eye opening revelations.

Of Changing Times

As a fan of science fiction, I have read a lot about how technology changes the way people look at things around them. I have also read many examples of how lost the human race will be without the many machines that proliferate our society. Thus, I entered the Technology and World Change class with many expectations and much excitement. And I found something that showed me that I never really knew what all those authors were trying to say.

First we saw a video that discussed the major state of flux that our planet is in. Then we had introductions all round, which was a nice touch. After that, we saw the starting of Guns, Germs and Steel which is basically a text/documentary which tries to find the root cause of major socio economics imbalances that exist today. However we did not remain soon on this topic and moved on to the relationship between creativity, invention and innovation. We also discussed the definition of technology and innovation in order to gain a more intuitive understanding of both.

An interesting idea that I had during this class was how technology could be something more than an advance from status quo. Technology as we discussed is supposed to make the lives of people better. Therefore technology development in places such as Asia and Africa could explore the return of labor intensive products which would better suit these places. Food for thought.

The key ideas from this class are -

1. TWC is a good class.

2. Our understanding of what technology needs to change.

As this for the first class, I don't really think we missed anything. We got a pretty good idea of what the prof expects from us and what the course is gonna be like. Also we know what we should expect from ourselves. Plus we are beginning to comprehend the subtle relationships between technology and its cousins - creativity, innovation etc.

I'd rate the session about a 9.

Also I'd like to thank the prof and the TA. I won't say this will be a breeze. It'll be pretty tough. But it should be a lot of fun thanks to them.