Internet Technology: User Experience and the Human Fate (1)
Since the dot-com bubble, the world has not remained the same. As potrayed in several sci- fi TV flicks such as the recent rave, Black Mirror, we knew Internet of Things has altered humanity permanently. The multiplicitous effect of whatever we do leaps at scale with every new technological tool at our disposal. But one particular technological instrument stands out of all – the Internet. New and breathtaking devices have taken over control of our lives, using the internet as the channel. One feels greatly empty without a smartphone these days. Insurgencies have been undertaken, wars instigated, revolutions largely aided by internet technology and its associated devices.
Advances in technology are not making matters simpler, nay harder either despite notable improvements in the human knowledge space. You would agree with me internet/consumer technology is the fastest growing and most popular of all aspects of modern technology, the attention it commands cannot be underscored.
It all started mainly with the internet which the Pentagon was instrumental to, as well as Tim Berners-Lee's invention of World Wide Web in 1989; the railroad on which the web ran was created. We are now quite capable of ordering pizza, ice-cream, burger and full meals from the convenience of a few taps of our keypads. We may not be so long away from downloading food or groceries straight out of our phones then. Google DeepMind, a machine learning tool is fast becoming the smartest thing you can ever imagine by beating a human in a AlphaGo game previously known to be uncharted territory for machines. It’s all happening very fast we do not know what next we are in for.
In the last 18 years, many internet technology companies have pioneered and fizzled out; a few retain and keep expanding their quota in the industry. Shall we then talk about how not only our world has changed drastically within that short time but also how human attitude to life, beliefs, knowledge, and opinion has shifted. How internet technology has allocated humans common leverage and assumed equality or equity as the case may be. It is not only altering the human pattern of living (which is not necessarily a bad thing), but not being equally sure of the multiplicitous effect this could have on our future is literally being thrown into the darkness of fate.
But oh my! We now seem to be buried in hordes of internet tech companies; with no way in the world to decipher which one is determined to keep us out of jobs in a few years time, or which one has its Internet of Things designed to be an eventual menace to the human race. There was only a time since the After Death (A.D.) when anything close to this sweeping wave happened - the Renaissance period, which was not even a worldwide trend as now, was sparse over a few centuries atleast. How our ‘barbaric and uncivilised’ world has changed drastically within a space of 30 years of a rat race (read, death race).
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I am still a little ruffled as to what these internet technology behemoths will be championing in the next 15 years. I recall a scene in a Sci-Fi TV episode where a very intelligent, solar-powered robotic dog hunts down a couple of intruders who trespassed on its territory: the tale had only a brutal end. Perhaps evil people would be able to quickly dispatch fatal biological viruses, dished out through millions of phones at the same time sometime in the bleak future. I can only hope an apocalypse is not at hand.
(to be continued)