Technology in a lot of ways is not unlike biological systems. For one, the technological marvels of today will become obsolete in the next few years. Just ask kids what a typewriter is and you'll know what I'm talking about. A lot of the have not even heard of an 8 track cassette or a vinyl record! Technology does change with time.
If technology is time dependent are we at its mercy such that we find ourselves one morning left behind? Of course not! Aside from the fact that it takes a while for people to adapt to new technology, it is also a fact that its evolution follows definite trends. In general, a technical system will continue improving towards increasing ideality. This means the quality of useful functions is improved while reducing harmful functions and cost. As an exanple remember the big clutch bag cellphones we had 20yrs ago? These later became the bowling pin phones followed by the fat shampoo bottle types. With the transition to gsm and 3g, phones became smaller and thinner. You see this similar trend with transportation, video, computing, etc.
The danger in using technological trends is when we take it as a linear, dogmatic timeline. I recently used an analysis of technology trends in the context of learning as part of social innovation. When we deal with learning technologies and systems, the trend if to go from a cognitive towards a more experiential mode, from an abstract to a concrete, transformational experience. It will be easy for us to take the normal trend of classroom learning -> tours -> immersion -> independent project as Gospel truth when you can create as system that jumps straight to exploration was what is normally done in the performing arts. Following an exploratory approach makes the learner responsible for his learning. This also implies that a lot of courses taught in schools and universities are actually inefficient and ineffective.
As innovators and technical professionals, it is to our best interest to determine the maturity of the technology we work with. This way we will be able to maximize the innovation that can be done with these. By predicting technology trends we will be able to take leadership of the great industries of tomorrow
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