The invention of the internet has to be one of the all time great things ever! Right up there with electricity, the internet has sped up our existence to where we are now. No big news there, except where we go from here.
It has been predicted that "all people" will be online by 2020. I agree with this and wonder if by that time we will have "got there" at last. I can't be the only one thinking this way, pretty much everything I see is becoming the same, there are less choices but they are far more efficient and inexpensive. Does everything become free? How does the free economy keep going? Hell we barely need government, certainly much less of it then what we have today. As Steve Jobs told us, "theres an app for that". Well there is an app for everything, road maintenance, welfare, immigration you can pretty much pick a department and an app can replace most of what those people do.
So to answer my question, "are we there yet", I would have to say, hmmmm, soon!
7 billion people, waiting for Captain Kirk to show up.
That said those apps are only as good as the people that make them and the assumptions underlying their results. Put that power into the wrong hands (government) and we are hooped. That being said, that is what is so great about open-source.
ReplyDeleteI think this new age will have to consist of more "thinking jobs". For instance, it is a waste of time for analysts to manually gather, collect and compile data from multiple databases that are in different formats. Thankfully we are starting to see algorithms that can do it for us, as long as we can write the code for doing so. So in essence we have, or will be able to, eliminate the mundane, labour intensive task of collecting the data and instead opened up more time to think about how to assess, analyze and evaluate the data. Perhaps even make better informed decisions.
I know you likely think that this will take over as well but I think human intuition and interdisciplinary teams are needed.