Week 1 - Exponential Times

Brief Overview

A big fan of technology, I was enthralled by the eye-opening video, 'Shift happens' that was played as an introduction to the first class of Technology & World Change. The video was simply fascinate me with the facts and statistics that were served. The most important thing that I learnt from the video though, is that we are living in an exponential time, when changes happen faster than ever before.

Going on to the lesson, we were going through the historical timeline to understand how technological revolution could impact human civilization. Another captivating video, the 'Gum Germ & Steels', was played to walk us through this. The video was made based on a question of 'why european people are more developed and civilized than the new guinean people', the same question, which will help us to understand "Technology and the Rise of Civilizations",

Key Takeaways

One thing that leave a deep impression to me is when I realized that we are living in an exponential time now, when changes could occur every few hours in the future. This was made possible because of technology, innovation and invention. From a significant invention hundreds thousand of years before when we, human, first invented fire to only few years back when we first invented the Internet that allow us to exchange information freely across the world, which play a significant role in fasten the pace of changes. One interesting quotes,

“The illiterate of the 21st Century won’t be those who can’t read and write but those who can’t learn, un-learn and re-learn”

made anonymously, was able to picture what will happen in the future, when changes are happen frequently, whether we are ready for it or not, and what we can do about it is just to quickly adapt to it.

In the end, I would rate the first class 7 out of 10. It was a good class, it never stop teasing my curiosity to know more about technology and how it changes the world. However, due to time constraint, I didn't able to gain much insight on how technology revolution could affect human civilization and what affect the development of technology in the primitive era, why the european are more 'superior' that the new guinean? So in the future It would be great if we can have more air time to discuss more about all these, so we can fully understand the concept.