Technology: Where are we going?

Technology has been assisting life for years. With simple inventions like the matchstick or the bicycle we were able to save time and energy in accomplishing the basics like igniting a fire or traveling to a distant place. This gave us more time and energy to pursue activities that interested us. Today, a person can visit many places, work in a variety of areas and experience many climates and cultures, while in the past he would've lived and died in the same location, performing the same monotonous tasks everyday, unaware of the world around him.

Today, long distance transportation and communication is becoming easy and widely available. Man has achieved his desire to see, hear, feel, smell and taste more of what the world has to offer in this short life. The invention of the internal combustion engine completely changed the way we live. Automobiles, boats, locomotives and aircrafts all run on it. Today the ordinary citizen can afford to possess vehicles or use public transport to travel long distances in short times. The problem, though, is that the engine runs on oil, a non-renewable energy source, which, during combustion, emits gases causing smog, acid rain and greenhouse effects, potentially damaging the environment. An even larger problem is, as Professor Goodstein, suggests in his book titled Out of Gas: The End of the Age, we had peaked discovery of global oil reserves in the 1960s and have now peaked global oil production, and with energy demand increasing rapidly in Asian markets, it's becoming a commodity with rising demand and declining supply. The developed world's involvement in the middle east can be attributed solely to their possession of a large portion of global oil reserves. Their involvement, whether political arm-twisting or violent in nature, as in the latter part of the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war and the Iraq invasion, was, earlier, to safeguard it's energy supplies and, later, to gain greater control of it. The inventors of the internal combustion engine could never have guessed their work could make oil worth more than human blood. Planet earth has sustained life for thousands of years. But, we reciprocrate the kindness by: mining for minerals, drilling for fossil fuel, paving concrete roads, logging trees, mortar shelling and exploding bombs. With our eagerness to consume and dispose we've piled up landfills with waste at alarming rates. A person weighing 150lbs drives alone in a 3 ton fuel hungry SUV. Indeed, technology has empowered people today, but someone elsewhere on the globe or down the line will suffer because of the exploitative existence we unknowingly live here today. Thanks to years of research in electronics, communication, mobile networking and materials is available as a easy-to-use product, namely the cellphone, even to rural regions in Asia.

Scientists and engineers are motivated to work on projects that challenge their intellectual capacity. They tout the "good" applications of their work. They remain, or choose to remain, ignorant of the "evil" side effects their work may have. Successfully experimenting for conversion of matter to energy through nuclear fission reactions has elated scientists. Today a significant portion of global resources are spent in developing and maintaining nuclear arsenal towards mass destruction. Since a nation's importance is judged by the amount of destruction the nation can inflict on earth, leadership positions are open exclusively to those who believe in the need and urgency of furthering the nuclear cause. I guess Neil Bohr and his associates had no clue about the massive long term effects their discoveries would have round the globe.

The inherent flaw I see in this is that the forces directing the research are those of (1) commercial/market forces and (2) government/defense funding agencies. These aren't altruistic agencies with a long-term vision for a better existence on our planet. They are myopic agencies that either need to beat Wall St. expectations next quarter or stay ahead of other nations in the race of perceived power.

I am currently employed as a researcher in the wireless networking group of a software research lab. Earlier cordless phones and later cellular phones revolutionalized voice telephony. The thrust has been to decrease dependance on a fixed wired infrastructure for communication. Currently, the first and the last leg of a communication circuit is cheaply and widely available over wireless mediums. Fixed wired infrastructure is used for the intermediate hops of the circuit and will continue to be used for awhile for bulk long-distance communication. Wireless networks of the future include sensor and actuator networks, for e.g., robots with light/thermal/motion sensors could sense human activity in a battlefield and collaboratively follow and monitor human traffic. With developments in physical layer technologies, i.e. signal processing, saturating in the near future, the push will be to design more expressive application protocols. Over the ages our ability, as humans, to communicate has evolved from exchanging simple messages to holding complex conversations. Computers have just learnt the art of communicating with each other. So we know where this is going.

The greater the number of people are becoming users of a technology, the more ways it's likely to be used. Since the invention of the wheel, technological capability has fallen into the hands into both, those with benign and those with malign intent. So, information security is a buzzword today. Computers communicate by processing data they receive, so, processing an invalid yet slyly crafted data unit could corrupt the computer. Curious bystanders could be snooping the data being communicated, make sense of and abuse it, if it isn't protected with encryption. Those unhappy seeing a machine communicate may use radio frequency jamming or other Denial of Service attacks to isolate it or render it non-operational. This problem is analogous to that of terrorism, billions of dollars and millions of man-hours have been spent and the surface hasn't been scratched yet. In the end, why are we doing all this? Don't the most popular internet activities include chit-chatting over the instant messenger, playing networked video games, and exchanging pornographic snippets?

I see our advancement in technology similar to a spider spinning its web. Some spiders continue spinning and ultimately get trapped in their own webs. Technology has picked up it's own momentum, there is no stopping it from advancing. Each big step we advance, many new issues crop up that take our attention and resources. Today, we are occupied with our cellular phones, laptops and cars; in the future additional paraphernalia adorning us will take their share of our time, effort and money. The question the spider forgot to ask itself in the process was, why it was spinning the web in the first place.