Anything that saves time or energy can be considered as a technology. A wheel, stone tools, and fire were the earliest technologies humans used to improve their life. Why would he need to improve something in the first place? The answer is to beat the enemy in the race or to grow in complexity.
Evolution takes large amounts of time to bring in a biological change, like adding a new organ or amend an organ. Technology helps us do that quickly without waiting for evolution. Radio, mobile phones, cars are some examples where we bypassed the evolution. Here are the some technologies that have changed our life so far.
Early stone tools helped a human to use them for the hunting and extract meat from the carcass. This was an added advantage in an environment where every animal depended on its own organs to hunt.
Nothing has touched human lives as fire. Fire helped early humans cook food, which retains the nutritional value of the food but with less load on our digestive system. Cooked food requires less chewing while raw good requires a lot of effort to break it down. This directed most of the energy for brain development. Brain development is the source of everything we get to see today. Remember twenty percent of the calories we consume are used to power the brain.
Fire helped us to protect from predators, survive in a colder environment, extend the day time which helped a human to gather together to discuss stories. Cognitive development improved. Even today without fire a lot will fail. We learned to control fire that has changed human life forever.
Wheels transformed how humans transport goods and move from one place to another and making places easily accessible. Exploration of new places led to new cultures.
Many modern technologies enhances our ability. Google glass is an attempt to enhance our visual capability. There are color blindness glasses6 that enhance the person to view a greater spectrum of colors.
Machines perform an action or set of actions, using mechanical power, on the input to produce output. This has reduced our need to depend too much on our physical strength.
Internet, the big data stream, is interconnection of computers across the globe enabling humans to achieve fastest information sharing. This, in fact, resembles a human body where each cell wants to survive while also coordinates among themselves to make a body. Each computer in the internet tries to keep its identity while giving meaning to the whole network.
This will open plethora of new things. New online communities will form where structure of religions will break apart. Religions and communities are based on common values where each one will follow and coordinate with each other. The same thing will happen with online communities, people of similar interests will hang out online, share their thoughts. Now we are not limited by the territory, with internet and faster transportation, we can reach people and places with ease.
Software is already changing how we work. Software contains set of logics, with the expected input it can apply the logics to produce the output. Since software can do this task millions of times showing without getting tired, humans can now focus on more creative jobs.
Machine learning and Artificial intelligence will take away some mental activities from a human leaving humans to focus on higher order problems. It is already happening, you read a couple of books, then ML will suggest books based on your reading habits and book similarity. The same ML and AI will have a greater impact on medical field, where it can consume a huge amount of data to rightly diagnose a disease, provide suggestions. There has been some progress on non-invasive gene editing, where they can alter certain gene responsible for a problem to fix it. Remember, the underlying units of a gene contain a set of information.
Nano technology will have a larger impact on engineering, medical devices, imaging, computing and many more. It has the capability to treat the root cause of medical complications like cancer. IoT, Internet of Things will grow to 50 billion sensors by 2020. What else can we expect?
Human body will undergo huge change. We had earlier carried goods on our hands, which required a lot of strength while now you just need enough strength to press a button. Natural selection is very optimal with body parts, we lost our tail once evolution decided we did not need it. In the same note, our body will evolve for faster transportation and information processing. Though our body’s evolution is relatively slower, our brain is a lot more flexible. Our brain’s plasticity allows new inputs to be interpreted. Neuroscientist Paul Bach-Y-Rita demonstrated that blind subjects can “see” objects even when visual information was fed through an unusual way. So new peripherals will be built to provide input to our brain.
Each technology was invented to help us, but they have triggered invention of other technologies to meet the growing demand. Similar to evolution, technology will also continue to grow and evolve in complexity (more on this in a different chapter).
There is already research happening to place people on Mars. Humanity has started to look beyond earth to survive. This is due to the natural calamities that earth faces often. When barriers are placed, the need to survive will force us to invent new technologies.
Technology is changing our brain already. In the past, we needed to retain information to survive, say, you need to remember your way back to the cave after the hunt. Now, GPS can do that easily. So a human brain will start to possess more analytical power. Logical and analytical thinking will be more prominent.