OK, it is time to move on with the Technology Integration of Man series… I last covered that the first two stages were mechanical machines, and then Mainframes. So let’s cover the next two stages which will bring us up to the current times. From there, I will spend a few postings talking about the future. The reason it is important to understand what is happening with humanity and the integration of technology into our lives is because we are finding this integration/dependence on tech is constantly altering our quality of life, how we work, and even the social strata of society. It is critical that we don’t get lost in the forest for trees. I have given lots of thought as to these stages and what they will mean for us, and the picture it creates, is intriguing.

Stage three was the advent of personal computers. For the first time in history, we moved the power of a computer into the hands of the individual, and away from the IT department. A couple of interesting things to note are that this stage came approx. 40 years after the mainframe era, and that it put the power and creative field of software development into the hands of hobbyists. This meant that the time between stages was starting to shrink, and that there would now be millions of people that could apply their innovative ideas into code that could that could be sold on the market directly to users. In other words, the economy was augmented with a new product set that would allow Microsoft, Lotus, Adobe, and many others to become multi-billion dollar companies. For those of us that lived through this time, it was a fantastic adventure of getting more and more powerful computers annually, and participating in the burdening software market where the person next door might write an application and hand it to you on a 5 ¼ floppy for $10. This era exploded and grew at a fantastic rate for about fifteen years, which brought us the next stage…

Stage four was the power of the Internet, or the Web to be more specific. The Internet as a technology had been around for a while, but not until the World Wide Web was created by putting a graphical front end and hyper-linking into the mix, did it really take off as a tool the masses grabbed a hold of. Now for the first time, humanity had a collective way to post and store data that could be accessed by anyone else in the world. We now had an underlying communication infrastructure that was electronic and extremely low cost. The Web started with people creating a single page, then they added sub pages, then e-commerce, then an explosion of applications that helped us find things on the Web, communicate in a myriad of ways over this network, and collaborate. Again, an interesting dynamic was that this stage came in half the time as the previous stage, and our adoption rate of this new technology was incredible. For the first time in humanity, we are connected to one another in an unfiltered way where any one person can “talk” to more than a billion people for free. And we the people get to decide what is valuable by reading it and voting it up or down if we choose. Talk about a democracy!

So how have these last three stages changed us? To list all of the ways would take many pages so in order to just think the big thoughts, let’s just pull out a few basics. This integration of technology into our lives so far has dramatically improved our quality of life by bringing us information to our fingertips that we never had. It allows us to entertain ourselves, heal ourselves, and work in completely new ways that are more flexible than any time in the past. It has begun a huge change in the economy and who can do what work from where. The types of jobs people hold are moving quickly from manufacturing to knowledge based, or tech development. Along with this list of positives, we have the negative. Kids who are addicted to technology who lose touch with reality for a while. An unfiltered access to information for young people who are seeing and being exposed to things earlier than is wise, and the enabling of adults that struggle with a myriad of moral problems. Without our recognizing the transitions, we are all moving quickly through foundational changes in how society operates.

Step back for a just a second and think about the fact that from 1940 to the present time, we invented mainframes, then reduced that power to PC’s, then created the Web to connect and leverage the collective thinking of anyone that has access. This was a mere 70 years, and the trend is toward faster adoption and creation of new stages. Although interesting in a historical way, the more interesting thing will be what the next 70 years will provide – that will come to you starting later this week…

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com