How Technology Is Shaping Our Lives Today

03 Feb 2019 - Arun Balajiee

Our lives are going to keep changing. But it is safe to say our lives have already changed a lot in the past decade. Or even in a lesser time span. And it is changing at a rapid pace. The rate of change of change is changing with every change that is happening over time. Let me step aside and break that previous sentence for you. Take for example, in 1950s people were only making theories of how computer would shape our lives. In 1960s people had started building computers that performed digital operations. In 1970s computer scientists started laying down the foundational concepts for many systems that we use without even thinking about for a second, as just theory. In 1980s, internet was just an idea on paper and in small scale use of the military. In the 90s, the file system of the internet was gopher protocol and www was just catching, browsers kept crashing, people never had so much faith in how computers could even have future(which is unimaginable today). Operating systems such as Mac and DOS started shaping into retail usage for Personal Computers. Personal computers started becoming a thing. But still lot of things kept crashing. Data was stored in floppy drives and people didn’t know what to do with just 12 MB of space!Lot of things were manual, websites were static, updates required people to sit at computers and wait for the update to go through. Heck, people had to re-write programs when the Millenium hit our lives of the Y2K. And then came the 2000s. Boom. Google accelerated its pace of setting up the foundations towards being one of the most successful behemoths that crunch data and produce results as a search engine. They revolutionized ideas in distributed systems, computer networks and hardware, pushing the frontiers of what could be achieved by modern era computer science. Microsoft and Apple started making software that were much more reliable and user friendly. Browsers became a common thing. People started using chat rooms online and Boom, started soon an idea Facebook, which changed the internet forever. and that happened in about a decades time around in 2007-09. But since then a new wave came, the wave of ML and AI that took the world of computer science by storm. The changes that took about a decade’s time to push frontiers in Computer Science, were nothing compared to the changes that the idea of ML was revolutionizing in less than 5 years time. by 2015, the world had cutting edge research work that had already been implemented as succesfully on various platforms that made using the technology of Neural Networks and Deep learning and data analytics all the more convenient and wide spread. Even while amazing concepts like Clould Computing were catching on, the idea of ML and AI had already carved its niche and demanded-attracted -grabbed people’s attention. It’s only a matter of time, now that in probably every year or maybe every six months or heck every day, we might see something which is a giant leap for mankind, and which would, for sure change our lives once and forever.