Nobody knows what lies ahead

Written by Jean-Claude Elias

Social and political impact of social networking. Health hazard of cellular phones. Computer games that make epileptic children. Ebooks that threaten to make hard copy books disappear. Scientific research papers that are nothing but a concatenation of unethical copying and pasting from the Internet. Viruses, spam e-mail, etc… Where does the impact of new technology stop? Do we really know what will it do to us in say ten years?

Despite all the writing and the documented guessing of the pundits the fact is nobody knows for sure. It is all going very fast and experience over a couple of generations has clearly shown that it takes long, long time to measure any kind of impact, let alone doing any foretelling. Of course, not all of it negative. As a matter of fact I for one believe that most of it is good, and not just because this is the field I happen to work in.

We thought we got accustomed to the speed of change but it keeps surprising the most blasé. The scale of progress and the numbers remain unbelievable. Not long ago it used to take several hours to copy a 100GB hard disk. The new memory card I bought last week for my camera moves data at 60MB per second!

It’s a bit like in politics. Even the experts or those who work in the field can’t predict what may lie ahead tomorrow.

The difficulty does not only come from fast evolving technical characteristics like increasing gigabytes and terabytes. It is chiefly due to the time it takes to study the impact and then to come up with credible results and explanation. Take cellular phones for instance.

We have been reading about the potential health hazard for more than 10 years now. Until last year, we were brought to believe that although there was no firm proof yet, scientists had all the reasons in the world to “strongly believe” that brain damage can be caused by long conversations when holding the device too close to your head. The pressure on manufacturers was increasing every year to disclose studies and numbers. Last month, however, the media were flooded by reports that reasons for worrying this way were unfounded and that cell phones were “probably” perfectly safe devices. Whether true or not remains to be seen. It just shows how hard it is to truly assess these things and that opinion and studies can change and even make a frank U-turn.

Another, less tangible, kind of impact is the widespread usage of laptops and the Internet among students. Again, for several years the trend was to think that the machine and the web were creating a generation of lazy “humanoids”, of little robots. Students in particular, it was believed, were having too much fun on the Internet and were becoming a passive breed, with reduced capability for thinking and analyzing.

Very recently the opinion has shifted and many educators now consider that the vast amount of information available on the web, combined with a strong motivation to move ahead, to compete with the others, is making a new generation of fast thinkers, of people who are much more efficient than their parents and who are smartly doing away with what is not anymore relevant today. In a word, all this is making them more intelligent. Indeed, the young are able to focus on what really matters.

On a similar front, there is now a global understanding that everything that has to do with the coordination of the five senses and with the cognitive perception of the world is enhanced by playing most forms of computer games. After having criticised these games for many years, educators now agree that they do more good than harm.

There are several other phenomena the impact of which can’t reasonably be assessed today. Even the already hotly debated social networks are still too new, relatively speaking. Other elements include ebooks, tablets and wifi that is built in devices like cameras and mobile phones. The assessment will not only be in terms of what is good or what is bad, often a subjective judgement, but in what way our living habits will be changed.

However hard experts try, time has proven them wrong time and again. It is unlikely that anyone can weigh and define the impact of what technology is doing to us today. As for predicting what may come in ten or twenty years, it can only be pure guess work.