SESSION NINE

This week’s session is on the topic of Emerging and Future technology. In the world we live today, most of our actions are unsustainable and this has been an alarming issue for humans. Therefore, this session gave us an exposure of some emerging technology that will ease our lives without depriving resources for our future generations.

I think humans will never want or need something until an innovation surfaces. It is perhaps hard to imagine living without the computer, airplanes or the mobile phones today or I should say we are practically handicapped without them. However, our ancestors did prove that we could in fact live without them. They had the simplest of inventions in the past but yet could live their lives per normal. It is quite shameful to say that we cannot live without them now. The rise of this phenomenon was due to the innovations after innovations that have surfaced to make our lives simpler today. We will never know we needed a computer when we were using the typewriter in the past, we will never know we needed an mp3 when we had the Walkman in the past, we will never know we needed an airplane when we were travelling by ship in the past, and the list goes on and on. We have seen the trend of humans becoming lazier and become more reliant on technology. Emerging technology we saw in the lesson gave us a sneak peek into the future. What we have today already seems perfect, therefore it was pretty exciting to see what is installed for us in the future. What we originally thought we did not need will perhaps be a necessity for us in the future.

One of the most mind-blowing emerging technology that I thoughtwas the 3D printer. Lots of articles have surfaced for this emerging technology where food, spanners or even blood vessels and body parts.

This really proved that technology knows no boundaries. Who would have thought printing a body part is possible, who would have thought that food can be “printed”? This will possibly bring huge benefits to the society. Being able to print tools will benefit real estate developers, fashion industry or even the medical field. They are able to print their models out with more precision so to build the real thing more accurately. I thought this invention is amazing and incredible, it is beyond our imagination that such can be actually printed.

Another quote brought up in class was “Innovation distinguishes the leader from the follower” by Steve Jobs. Prof asked us what this quote meant in class and I had no answers then but I do now. What is a leader? A leader is someone who leads. When you dare to innovate, you are already a leader because a follower will never even think of innovating. So what is a follower? A follower is one that follows and will blindly be led by a leader. Therefore, it is easy to distinguish a leader from a follower through innovation. Steve Jobs is the man behind the most valuable company in the world and is undoubtedly a leader. He led the world in the mobile device arena that competitors find it hard to compete, he was the creator of the iPad, Macbooks and was the founder of Pixar Inc. He was truly an inspiration with his innovations.