The View | Are we in danger of taking technology for granted and losing the magic of innovation?

Dickie Liang-Hong Ke says wondrous technological innovations have become so commonplace that we risk forgetting the effort needed to sustain these discoveries. Concrete support aside, we need to nurture the spirit of invention

Reading Time:3 minutes

A woman wears a virtual reality simulator during the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2017. To sustain the passion for inspiring and promoting the latest developments, we need to look to our schools, our universities and colleges to inspire the young. Photo: AFP

Published: 11:00pm, 2 Jan 2019Updated: 3:12am, 3 Jan 2019

Technology has become truly pervasive. It is wide and it is deep. It transcends industries, professions, economies (developed and emerging) and straddles the globe, showing no respect for borders or passports.

Technology has presented us with a somewhat eccentric narrative over the years. In the 1950s and 1960s, technology was characterised by the space race. The British prime minister at the time called this era “the white heat of technology”, perhaps summoning up a reimagining of the forges and the “dark satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution. In the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, IT and telecoms, together with a myriad of embryonic online businesses, defined “tech”. In 2018, AI, the internet of things, blockchain, XR (extended reality), AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality) and MR (mixed reality) were the buzzwords.

Today, at the edge of the 2020s, technology is truly everywhere. The scope and range of innovation in technology is truly awe-inspiring, ranging from advances in materials science, to developments in propulsion systems, to an exponential growth in energy solutions and services.

In 2018, we saw the beginnings of ambient computing, huge strides in robotics, “cloaks of invisibility”, robocops and flying police scooters in Dubai, and serious plans for a commercial jet replacement for that venerable Anglo-French queen of the skies, the Concorde. Meanwhile, the convergent technologies of telecoms and IT are no dawdlers. The coming of 5G will represent the greatest leap in processing speed since computing began, and it is predicted that 5G will be a staggering 20 times faster than 4G. And for those of us concerned about the future of education, AI and VR are transforming the classroom.

One could devote quite a bit of editorial space to identifying the top technologies to look out for in 2019, but then, everyone does that, don’t they (and, frankly, they’re not all that hard to predict). The more important questions to be asked concerning technology are philosophical, and not related to the stepping stones mankind might take in the next year, or even in five, 10 and 50 years.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x

.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}The View | Are we in danger of taking technology for granted and losing the magic of innovation?

The View | Are we in danger of taking technology for granted and losing the magic of innovation?