ICT and World Change

Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Love it or hate it, we make use of ICT everyday in our lives. Recently on a trip to Malaysia, I observed that the first thing everyone did when they reached Singapore customs was not to check their passports or other important documents, but to check their phones for their emails or Facebook updates. It would be an exaggeration to say that we cannot live without ICT, but things will definitely move along very much slower without it. To borrow a quote from last weeks lesson, “Man's mind, once stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.” Oliver Wendell Holmes. This is also applicable to ICT, whereby once we are introduced to a new technology, such as wireless connections or 3G mobile, we find it hard to do without them.

We viewed a video regarding the ‘Project Natal’ about how technology has allowed us to interact with a virtual character, called Milo, which was reactive and was able to respond according to what the user did. It was supposedly unscripted and realistic that the person in the video behaved as though she was interacting with a real person. Although I thought the idea was interesting, it failed to convince me that the video was totally unscripted and that the character was truly able to react to every different situation. Nevertheless, it is an interesting insight to what could happen in the future of artificial intelligence.

We also discussed the different areas of ICT, such as passive vs interacting mass media, whereby we used to be able to only get information from sources such as newspapers and not be able to voice our opinions to the public. Also, the evolution of the internet (from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0) is pretty interesting as sites such as Google and Amazon are now able to predict what users want, based on previous searches on purchases. This gives us a greater variety of choices, as we may see something we did not know about and actually end up buying stuff we do not really need, or end up researching or reading up on another topic whereby the subject is miles away from the initial intended topic. Cloud computing was also brought up and the question of whether cloud computing would totally eliminate the need for personal storage equipment, such as hard disks. I feel that we still need our own personal privacy and uploading and storing our stuff on a common server would eliminate privacy completely. Hence I feel that cloud computing would slowly become more pervasive, but would not completely overtake.

This would be due to the risks and dangers with ICT, which was discussed in the last part of the lesson. We are beginning to lose our privacy on the online world, whereby everything we do online, be it a blog post or twitter update can be seen by every one around the world. Also, we are exposed to other harmful information or corrupting influences online, such as pornography or sexual predators and there’s little we can do about it but to educate the people. The risk of impersonation online is also higher, as it is difficult to certify who we are communicating with online is really who he claims to be. This exposes us to being more easily cheated and such cases are becoming more and more prevalent in our society.

I would rate this lesson an 8/10 as the topics that were discussed got me interested and I ended up spending some time researching on some of the topics, such as the ‘Project Natal’ and the future of artificial intelligence. I’m looking forward to the next session on the BioBusiness Revolution!