Technology And The Future

The book I read to research this post was Technology And The Future by Peter Von Stackelberg which is a very good book that I read at kindle unlimited. This book is around 90 pages so isn’t very long. It’s about the impact of technology in general rather than specific technologies. Science fiction is normally heavily influenced by the current political climate and people’s dreams and aspirations. It isn’t normally very accurate in what the future will actually. In the 40’s and 50’s it was heavily influenced by people like HG Wells and Arthur C Clarke. More recently it tends to be influenced by the various Star Trek series and films and the Star Wars films. A new invention isn’t automatically a good thing. There are almost certainly winners and losers. Losers for example might be people who work in a factory building products with the old technology who are now going to be made redundant. They might also be people who are going to be displaced from their homes with minimal compensation to make way for a factory building the product. These pros and cons have to be weighed up. We are currently in the Information Age but that is the developed world as many countries are still trying to catch and many are still in the Industrial Age. In time these countries will catch up. They are in most cases also catching up in things like healthcare and employment rights. Currently in many countries workers work in terrible conditions often with no set minimum wage. The author of this book is from Western canada and was born in the 50’s. He compares the world then when in 1962 they had 1 TV channel, newspapers had to be transported from a distant city and were invariably a day late. Compare that to the hundreds of TV stations we have now and the internet where people have instant access to the latest news and it isn’t confined to the print medium because we now have e-books. The world is changing at a very rapid pace and many people do risk being left behind especially older people. It is important people embrace change and the idea your education stops when you get a job is probably coming to an end. I did quite enjoy this book and I think would recommend it.