the develpment and future technologies : Going to Artifical Intelligence

Since the start of the industrial revolution in the early 1700s, technology advancement is moving extremely rapidly as compared to earlier days of human existence. Development in metallurgy brought about the possibility of mass producing products of all kinds which includes copper wires, machinery, guns, engines and many more. I probably do not have to explain how this development have changed our lives. Other huge developments in technology came about in the development of electricity, telephones, air travel and the internet. If I were living in the 1700s, I will surely not think that there could be a day, 300 odds years later, that people could communicate online, video conference and access to the world of information from a mobile device (well telephones haven’t been invented in the 1700s). So what is the future of technology for us 100, 200, 300 years from now? This is one question I don’t think anyone can answer however, let’s look at the near future of information technology development for us.

Information technology in organisations have jump leaps and bounds within the last 30 odd years, from the simple desktop computers to enterprise applications like ERP, SCM, BI and so on. Internet has been one of the key drivers in the development of such systems as it allows fast communication between two parties. Looking at many of these technologies, I realised that they are targeted at automation of manual tasks or improve information flow. So far technology have yet to harness the power of humans. Even though I have been preaching about the benefits and possibilities of leveraging the wisdom of crowds, social networking and collaboration, there is still alot to be done. I still feel that alot of organisations are targeting improving the performance of their work teams or strong tied teams (read this to understand what I am talking about) they have left out optimising leveraging crowd wisdom, innovation and getting the right people together quickly to solve a task. I believe that this is the immediate future of enterprise technologies. After all, the great Michael Porter believes that “Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity”.

Secondly, ,  the limit of information processing with the current set of technologies we use. However,  There are redundant things we do everyday like getting to work or reading a report, processing the information and raising issues. Artificial intelligence is probably next in the pipeline for technology advancement. Within the scope of AI, there are many sub issues we need to solve first, for example, heuristics and natural language processing. With these technologies, humans could optimise their time for work and leisure and reduce the non-productive activities we have to get through daily.

This is an exciting era to live in and I am excited to see how things pan out. This is obviously just my personal take on what I think of the future. What is your take?