#9

This week's topic was on Emerging Technology. This week is specially significant to me because of course, it's my individual presentation week! Also, it is the topic I anticipated the most because it sounds the most interesting and probably was one of the most interesting lessons so far.

The lesson kicked off with one of my favorite quotes quoted in the slides:

You see things and you say, 'Why?'
But I dream things that never were and I say, 'Why not?'

The quote explains so much about emerging technology. It requires us to have an extremely open mindset, to accept what seems impossible and make it possible. The lesson follows with Prof discussing some of the drivers for emerging technology. One example is the idea of supply creating demand. I thought this point was particularly interesting especially since it is applicable to my topical review paper. For technology that does not yet exist, of course we would not imagine how we could need them. But once it emerges, the existence of the product itself makes us realize how much we really need it, and in turn creates its own demand. I stated the same point in my topical review paper for smartphones, that we never knew we needed smartphones until they actually became a revolutionary product. Now, we can barely live without it. In the same sense, I believe this is a strong driver for emerging technology. Once we realize that we need it, it is a strong driver for the emerging technology to become a revolutionary one.

Several examples of emerging technology would be augmented reality, robotics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence systems. Several interesting videos were shown in class today, the memorable ones being the video on augmented reality and a video on the 'ideal woman'.



I'm not going to lie, Lisa kinda scares me. Yes she does have human-like features, but she is so obviously a robot. It's disturbing to actually watch a robot take the form of a human and still be very robotic. I honestly would feel more at ease if the robot has the metallic look we're used to. Haha.
But of course, that's besides the point.
Lisa was designed to be 'the perfect woman', to satisfy all the needs of the many single men in the world. To me, although this idea is fascinating and I am indeed impressed by the technology involved, I definitely do not approve of such a technology attracting high demand from the world. It indeed redefines what it means to be 'human'. Not to mention, my peer in the class later on presented on robots that are capable of love. One day, we may no longer know where to draw the line between robots and humans.

This week's presentations were all interesting and good. I liked Ryan's presentation on nanotechnology. He focused on the idea of having a robotic arm that can enhance your physical performance greatly. For handicapped people, definitely this idea is appealing. But what about to people with perfectly functioning arms? Now we may think that we would never want something robotic and 'fake', but in the future if it starts to become revolutionary, we may realize we want this robotic arm for the extra power and capability.

For me, I presented on augmented reality and its possibilities. Having done a lot of research for this presentation, I realized how close yet far augmented reality really is. We already have many applications of AR, but most of us don't really know about it. I myself have an Android phone but had no idea Layar and under AR devices were available, free to download. Of course currently this applications are limited, but the fact that it has already existed for some time, is surprising. Yet, why do I say that it is far? Because AR comes with a lot of obstacles and limitations. Mostly, the idea of AR for information purposes is unable to expand that far recently because of issues of privacy. Being able to know who the person sitting next to you exactly is, get access to his network information... these are things that raise issues on privacy. Of course, one can always edit his phone settings to disallow sharing of information. This also is a reason why AR could not expand. We are not yet ready to embrace the idea of being fully connected and being able to know everything about anything with just one touch of a finger.

The various forms of emerging technology are indeed fascinating. Definitely, it requires us to have an open mind to embrace it so that it can finally 'emerge'.

This lesson covered plenty of discussion topics. I would rate it 10/10. Best lesson so far. (: