Lesson 2 (23 Aug 2011)

There are two themes for today, with the first being “technology, society and global dominance”, and the second is “Technology and Human Development”.

Technology, Society and Global Dominance

For the article “Innovations in the reset world”, I think that the title itself is very attention grabbing as it suggests that the world had undergone really massive changes. What I like most about this article is how the writer actually classified and summarised the solutions to changes into 3 boxes, where box 1 is about “managing the present’, box 2 is about “selectively managing the past”, and box 3 is about “creating the future”. When combined together, it will in my opinion, allow one to stay ahead of the pack and lead the changes instead of waiting for changes to occur and then adapting to it. In a way, this ‘box package’ is very much like a hedge against the inevitable changes, and only the ‘owner’ of this package can succeed and prosper through such uncertain times.  It may seem elitist here that only the lucky or smarter (depends on how you view it) few who gain possession of the’ package’ are allowed to achieve success, but this is all part of the harsh realistic world that we live in. Whether we like it or not, changes are going to occur. Not even the stepping down of Steve Jobs as the CEO of Apple can make the world come to a standstill.

Technology and human development

According to Wikipedia, there are four pillars to human development, namely equity, sustainability, production and empowerment. Essentially, it’s all about expanding the number choices offered to us, and allowing people to lead the life that they actually value. Undoubtedly, technology has contributed greatly to the human development in terms of offering us a significant increased number of choices. However, amidst the benefits, it has also contradicted the four pillars (stated above).

 Following discussions below will be based on our reading article “The Colonial Holocaust and its Legacy”. With regards to this article, I must first express my horror at the atrocious lies that we had been told about Columbus. Columbus had always been known to us as “Columbus the Great”, but what most of us fail to realise was the dark side of him. He spearheaded the Colonialism movement which is based on this extremely biased notion that the Europeans are far greater than the non-Europeans because of their superior military technology. The non-Europeans were sorely mistreated and many of them were killed. The third world countries were also exploited for their labour and natural resources, and our planet was harmed in the process.  Evidently, technology has been misused in this case and it could lead to a lasting and devastating outcome.

I think that what we can take away from today’s lesson ties in very nicely to the key message of my presentation: Technology is a double-edged sword and whether it is more detrimental or beneficial to us very much depends on how we weld this sword. History had chosen, and now it’s time for our generation to make our choice!

On a personal note, I would give today’s lesson a rating of 8/10. I feel that we could have extended our discussion to include how human development has also affect the development of technology as I think that technology and human development has a mutual effect on each other.