past and present technology then and now essay

How has technology changed - and changed us - in the past 20 years?

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Stay up to date:, technological transformation.

• Since the dotcom bubble burst back in 2000, technology has radically transformed our societies and our daily lives.
• From smartphones to social media and healthcare, here's a brief history of the 21st century's technological revolution.

Just over 20 years ago, the dotcom bubble burst , causing the stocks of many tech firms to tumble. Some companies, like Amazon, quickly recovered their value – but many others were left in ruins. In the two decades since this crash, technology has advanced in many ways.

Many more people are online today than they were at the start of the millennium. Looking at broadband access, in 2000, just half of Americans had broadband access at home. Today, that number sits at more than 90% .

This broadband expansion was certainly not just an American phenomenon. Similar growth can be seen on a global scale; while less than 7% of the world was online in 2000, today over half the global population has access to the internet.

Similar trends can be seen in cellphone use. At the start of the 2000s, there were 740 million cell phone subscriptions worldwide. Two decades later, that number has surpassed 8 billion, meaning there are now more cellphones in the world than people

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At the same time, technology was also becoming more personal and portable. Apple sold its first iPod in 2001, and six years later it introduced the iPhone, which ushered in a new era of personal technology. These changes led to a world in which technology touches nearly everything we do.

Technology has changed major sectors over the past 20 years, including media, climate action and healthcare. The World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers , which just celebrated its 20th anniversary, gives us insight how emerging tech leaders have influenced and responded to these changes.

Media and media consumption

The past 20 years have greatly shaped how and where we consume media. In the early 2000s, many tech firms were still focused on expanding communication for work through advanced bandwidth for video streaming and other media consumption that is common today.

Others followed the path of expanding media options beyond traditional outlets. Early Tech Pioneers such as PlanetOut did this by providing an outlet and alternative media source for LGBTQIA communities as more people got online.

Following on from these first new media options, new communities and alternative media came the massive growth of social media. In 2004 , fewer than 1 million people were on Myspace; Facebook had not even launched. By 2018, Facebook had more 2.26 billion users with other sites also growing to hundreds of millions of users.

While these new online communities and communication channels have offered great spaces for alternative voices, their increased use has also brought issues of increased disinformation and polarization.

Today, many tech start-ups are focused on preserving these online media spaces while also mitigating the disinformation which can come with them. Recently, some Tech Pioneers have also approached this issue, including TruePic – which focuses on photo identification – and Two Hat , which is developing AI-powered content moderation for social media.

Climate change and green tech

Many scientists today are looking to technology to lead us towards a carbon-neutral world. Though renewed attention is being given to climate change today, these efforts to find a solution through technology is not new. In 2001, green tech offered a new investment opportunity for tech investors after the crash, leading to a boom of investing in renewable energy start-ups including Bloom Energy , a Technology Pioneer in 2010.

In the past two decades, tech start-ups have only expanded their climate focus. Many today are focuses on initiatives far beyond clean energy to slow the impact of climate change.

Different start-ups, including Carbon Engineering and Climeworks from this year’s Technology Pioneers, have started to roll out carbon capture technology. These technologies remove CO2 from the air directly, enabling scientists to alleviate some of the damage from fossil fuels which have already been burned.

Another expanding area for young tech firms today is food systems innovation. Many firms, like Aleph Farms and Air Protein, are creating innovative meat and dairy alternatives that are much greener than their traditional counterparts.

Biotech and healthcare

The early 2000s also saw the culmination of a biotech boom that had started in the mid-1990s. Many firms focused on advancing biotechnologies through enhanced tech research.

An early Technology Pioneer, Actelion Pharmaceuticals was one of these companies. Actelion’s tech researched the single layer of cells separating every blood vessel from the blood stream. Like many other biotech firms at the time, their focus was on precise disease and treatment research.

While many tech firms today still focus on disease and treatment research, many others have been focusing on healthcare delivery. Telehealth has been on the rise in recent years , with many young tech expanding virtual healthcare options. New technologies such as virtual visits, chatbots are being used to delivery healthcare to individuals, especially during Covid-19.

Many companies are also focusing their healthcare tech on patients, rather than doctors. For example Ada, a symptom checker app, used to be designed for doctor’s use but has now shifted its language and interface to prioritize giving patients information on their symptoms. Other companies, like 7 cups, are focused are offering mental healthcare support directly to their users without through their app instead of going through existing offices.

The past two decades have seen healthcare tech get much more personal and use tech for care delivery, not just advancing medical research.

The World Economic Forum was the first to draw the world’s attention to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the current period of unprecedented change driven by rapid technological advances. Policies, norms and regulations have not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation, creating a growing need to fill this gap.

The Forum established the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network in 2017 to ensure that new and emerging technologies will help—not harm—humanity in the future. Headquartered in San Francisco, the network launched centres in China, India and Japan in 2018 and is rapidly establishing locally-run Affiliate Centres in many countries around the world.

The global network is working closely with partners from government, business, academia and civil society to co-design and pilot agile frameworks for governing new and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) , autonomous vehicles , blockchain , data policy , digital trade , drones , internet of things (IoT) , precision medicine and environmental innovations .

Learn more about the groundbreaking work that the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network is doing to prepare us for the future.

Want to help us shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Contact us to find out how you can become a member or partner.

In the early 2000s, many companies were at the start of their recovery from the bursting dotcom bubble. Since then, we’ve seen a large expansion in the way tech innovators approach areas such as new media, climate change, healthcare delivery and more.

At the same time, we have also seen tech companies rise to the occasion of trying to combat issues which arose from the first group such as internet content moderation, expanding climate change solutions.

The Technology Pioneers' 2020 cohort marks the 20th anniversary of this community - and looking at the latest awardees can give us a snapshot of where the next two decades of tech may be heading.

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Technology then & now – comparison of past & present technology.

• by Hadiya Ikram
• October 24, 2022
• 3 minutes read
• 2 years ago

When we explore the development of technology, we can see how it has changed over time. These innovations help us understand how swiftly technology is developing. Today, technology created by humans itself rules the planet.

Vintage Technologies That We No Longer Use

• Phonographs
• Reel to Reel
• Cassette Tape Recorders
• Transistor Radios
• Cassette Tapes
• Telex Machines

Our lives are now controlled by technology. Without smartphones, tablets, laptops, and computers, we couldn’t function. The technology market has boomed briefly, and many people today find it impossible to envision life without it. Understanding how technology develops and why it matters is essential to comprehend how we emerged from the dark ages (which weren’t long ago) to where we are now.

1: Way of Communication:

The advancement of technology has altered how we communicate. Back then, the only means of communication with people who lived far away was through the mail. Several technologies are now available to stay in contact with your folks. Calls, video chats, faxes, and texts are all possible with

2: CyberSecurity:

Security was necessary for everyone, whether they lived in 2022 or survived until 2035. Previously, or at that time, security was reserved for your home. Banks or shops employ security guards to safeguard your most valuable possessions. Cybersecurity takes steps to safeguard your valuable data online. These experts in cutting-edge technology shield everything from information about your bank account to data on your mobile device.

There are around 300 million hacker attempts worldwide, and all data sold on the black market depends on the sort of data or whose firms’ data is involved. As a result, huge businesses are now present here.

3: AI & Robotics:

You may have seen or heard about how robots would rule the world in 2030 and make people their servants in several movies. Some scientists thought of this as a comparison of human DNA and technology.

Science is addressing these AI robots as a significant threat to the current demanding jobs, even though their involvement was in processes in many industries. Hotels started them as waiters, or some machinery robots were used in packing factories or manufactured and assembled the product in the factory. According to research, machine learning is one of the most in-demand abilities worldwide, earning 190$ billion.

4: Advancement in Transportation:

Traveling back then took time. The only available modes of transportation at the time were ships, tiny wagons, and horse-drawn carriages with a terrible reputation. Arrival at the address takes a while. Transport is more practical as a result of technological advancement.

The pace at which technology progresses is extraordinary. Numerous new forms of transportation, including vehicles and planes, have been made possible by technology. Travel has undergone a rapid transformation thanks to recent inventions.

5: Progressive Media:

There haven’t been many entertainment-related technologies in history. However, technology development has also had great success in this area. Such devices were created using digital technology, enabling you to learn anything while sitting in your room.

The most popular kind of connectivity in the world is the internet. It offers several platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others. Just one click or tap, and you can connect to the globe; thanks to these platforms.

Conclusion:

Technologies always find a solution in due course and evolve. In the past year, technology has progressed at the speed of light. If a caveman lived in that period, he would be astounded to see a skillfully done digital appraisal.

Technical methods rely on the requirement for inventions to address problems. In the past, when Covid 19 emerged, we all entered the era of digital evolution, which, whether we like it or not, we must follow to survive. Problems have always been solved by new technologies.

Future years will witness more innovative technologies sprout and develop. Additionally, all of the aforementioned developing technologies directly affect you. Your contemporary mixed work environment is transformed by them as well.

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Technology of the Past and Present

Living in a rapidly changing world can be challenging, but it also provides numerous opportunities to examine the differences between the lifestyles of people living in the past and present. They are primarily related to technological development since it defines types and quality of communication of any kind. In this way, the Internet and social media shape our mindsets and the perceptions of life goals that we obtain while interacting with others. Moreover, they define the degree of trust in relationships and the number of time people spends together.

Life in the past seems to be more favorable in terms of meaningful connections and focusing on a limited number of people. Due to the lack of opportunities to contact another person any time, day or night, our parents and grandparents valued their relationships more than we do. As for mass media, this source of information was more reliable and, therefore, trusted. The lack of specific opportunities, such as the Internet and other modern technologies, did not prevent people from being sociable. However, it definitely reduced the level of stress resulting from the continuous comparison of oneself with others.

The present-day world with its limitless opportunities for socialization does not improve its quality. Most interactions do not contribute to one’s sense of belonging to the community or society, and they result in the emergence of depression and other mental health issues. People tend to be jealous of others’ successes and compare themselves with those who seem to be luckier than others. Hence, the principal effects of current socialization methods on types and quality of social interactions related to the general worsening of communication and the replacement of meaningful connections by numerous contacts.

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Technology over the long run: zoom out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime

It is easy to underestimate how much the world can change within a lifetime. considering how dramatically the world has changed can help us see how different the world could be in a few years or decades..

Technology can change the world in ways that are unimaginable until they happen. Switching on an electric light would have been unimaginable for our medieval ancestors. In their childhood, our grandparents would have struggled to imagine a world connected by smartphones and the Internet.

Similarly, it is hard for us to imagine the arrival of all those technologies that will fundamentally change the world we are used to.

We can remind ourselves that our own future might look very different from the world today by looking back at how rapidly technology has changed our world in the past. That’s what this article is about.

One insight I take away from this long-term perspective is how unusual our time is. Technological change was extremely slow in the past – the technologies that our ancestors got used to in their childhood were still central to their lives in their old age. In stark contrast to those days, we live in a time of extraordinarily fast technological change. For recent generations, it was common for technologies that were unimaginable in their youth to become common later in life.

The long-run perspective on technological change

The big visualization offers a long-term perspective on the history of technology. 1

The timeline begins at the center of the spiral. The first use of stone tools, 3.4 million years ago, marks the beginning of this history of technology. 2 Each turn of the spiral represents 200,000 years of history. It took 2.4 million years – 12 turns of the spiral – for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking. 3

To be able to visualize the inventions in the more recent past – the last 12,000 years – I had to unroll the spiral. I needed more space to be able to show when agriculture, writing, and the wheel were invented. During this period, technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between each of these three inventions.

From 1800 onwards, I stretched out the timeline even further to show the many major inventions that rapidly followed one after the other.

The long-term perspective that this chart provides makes it clear just how unusually fast technological change is in our time.

You can use this visualization to see how technology developed in particular domains. Follow, for example, the history of communication: from writing to paper, to the printing press, to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, all the way to the Internet and smartphones.

Or follow the rapid development of human flight. In 1903, the Wright brothers took the first flight in human history (they were in the air for less than a minute), and just 66 years later, we landed on the moon. Many people saw both within their lifetimes: the first plane and the moon landing.

This large visualization also highlights the wide range of technology’s impact on our lives. It includes extraordinarily beneficial innovations, such as the vaccine that allowed humanity to eradicate smallpox , and it includes terrible innovations, like the nuclear bombs that endanger the lives of all of us .

What will the next decades bring?

The red timeline reaches up to the present and then continues in green into the future. Many children born today, even without further increases in life expectancy, will live well into the 22nd century.

New vaccines, progress in clean, low-carbon energy, better cancer treatments – a range of future innovations could very much improve our living conditions and the environment around us. But, as I argue in a series of articles , there is one technology that could even more profoundly change our world: artificial intelligence (AI).

One reason why artificial intelligence is such an important innovation is that intelligence is the main driver of innovation itself. This fast-paced technological change could speed up even more if it’s driven not only by humanity’s intelligence but also by artificial intelligence. If this happens, the change currently stretched out over decades might happen within a very brief time span of just a year. Possibly even faster. 4

I think AI technology could have a fundamentally transformative impact on our world. In many ways, it is already changing our world, as I documented in this companion article . As this technology becomes more capable in the years and decades to come, it can give immense power to those who control it (and it poses the risk that it could escape our control entirely).

Such systems might seem hard to imagine today, but AI technology is advancing quickly. Many AI experts believe there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, as I documented in this article .

Technology will continue to change the world – we should all make sure that it changes it for the better

What is familiar to us today – photography, the radio, antibiotics, the Internet, or the International Space Station circling our planet – was unimaginable to our ancestors just a few generations ago. If your great-great-great grandparents could spend a week with you, they would be blown away by your everyday life.

What I take away from this history is that I will likely see technologies in my lifetime that appear unimaginable to me today.

In addition to this trend towards increasingly rapid innovation, there is a second long-run trend. Technology has become increasingly powerful. While our ancestors wielded stone tools, we are building globe-spanning AI systems and technologies that can edit our genes.

Because of the immense power that technology gives those who control it, there is little that is as important as the question of which technologies get developed during our lifetimes. Therefore, I think it is a mistake to leave the question about the future of technology to the technologists. Which technologies are controlled by whom is one of the most important political questions of our time because of the enormous power these technologies convey to those who control them.

We all should strive to gain the knowledge we need to contribute to an intelligent debate about the world we want to live in. To a large part, this means gaining knowledge and wisdom on the question of which technologies we want.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank my colleagues Hannah Ritchie, Bastian Herre, Natasha Ahuja, Edouard Mathieu, Daniel Bachler, Charlie Giattino, and Pablo Rosado for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay and the visualization. Thanks also to Lizka Vaintrob and Ben Clifford for the conversation that initiated this visualization.

Appendix: About the choice of visualization in this article

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. When you visualize this development on a linear timeline, then most of the timeline is almost empty, while all the action is crammed into the right corner:

In my large visualization here, I tried to avoid this problem and instead show the long history of technology in a way that lets you see when each technological breakthrough happened and how, within the last millennia, there was a continuous acceleration of technological change.

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. In the appendix, I show how this would look if it were linear.

It is, of course, difficult to assess when exactly the first stone tools were used.

The research by McPherron et al. (2010) suggested that it was at least 3.39 million years ago. This is based on two fossilized bones found in Dikika in Ethiopia, which showed “stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access”. These marks were interpreted as being caused by meat consumption and provide the first evidence that one of our ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools.

The research by Harmand et al. (2015) provided evidence for stone tool use in today’s Kenya 3.3 million years ago.

References:

McPherron et al. (2010) – Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia . Published in Nature.

Harmand et al. (2015) – 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya . Published in Nature.

Evidence for controlled fire use approximately 1 million years ago is provided by Berna et al. (2012) Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa , published in PNAS.

The authors write: “The ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution, but the question of when hominins first developed this ability still remains. Here we show that micromorphological and Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (mFTIR) analyses of intact sediments at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa, provide unambiguous evidence—in the form of burned bone and ashed plant remains—that burning took place in the cave during the early Acheulean occupation, approximately 1.0 Ma. To the best of our knowledge, this is the earliest secure evidence for burning in an archaeological context.”

This is what authors like Holden Karnofsky called ‘Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement’ or PASTA. Some recent developments go in this direction: DeepMind’s AlphaFold helped to make progress on one of the large problems in biology, and they have also developed an AI system that finds new algorithms that are relevant to building a more powerful AI.

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Technology then and now, yvette smith.

In today’s digital world, we take downloading images quickly and easily for granted. Just a few decades ago downloading images from our spacecraft was not quite so simple. Before there were computers and software that could stitch together digital images, they were printed on photo paper, trimmed by hand, and taped in place on a large black board, according to a detailed diagram of the spacecraft’s photo coverage of a planet. This preliminary mosaic was then photographed and used to provide a rough view of coverage, show latitude and longitude of geographical features, and show gaps in coverage. Additional mosaics were later created with filtered, corrected and enhanced photos, and more precise scale and placement.

In this image from 1972, Patricia “Patsy” Conklin worked in the Bioscience and Planetology Section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She was one of the people at JPL who assembled Mariner 9 photos into large mosaics. JPL produced 96 mosaic boards of selected areas of the Martian surface, and the United States Geological Survey created others. A photo mosaic was also created on a four-foot globe.

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Innovation, Then and Now

• Walter Frick

Why do we lionize the tech industry’s past and mock its present?

In the second episode of Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s new show about the birth of personal computing, the protagonist encourages his two recruits—a hardware engineer and a coder—to ignore a recent setback and keep working to build a new kind of PC. “I thought that maybe we could do this precisely because we’re all unreasonable people,” he tells them, borrowing from George Bernard Shaw. “And progress depends on our changing the world to fit us—not the other way around.”

• Walter Frick is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review , where he was formerly a senior editor and deputy editor of HBR.org. He is the founder of Nonrival , a newsletter where readers make crowdsourced predictions about economics and business. He has been an executive editor at Quartz as well as a Knight Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and an Assembly Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He has also written for The Atlantic , MIT Technology Review , The Boston Globe , and the BBC, among other publications.

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Past, Present and Future: The Evolution of Technology

Smartphones, tablets, and computers run our lives these days. In very little time technology has exploded in the market and now, many people cannot imagine a life without it. To understand how we got from back in the dark ages (which really wasn’t all that long ago) to where we are today, it is important to understand how technology evolves.

All technologies are born out of purpose. For example, search engines were created to sort through the massive amounts of data online. With each new upgrade technology compounds existing technologies to create something better than what was previously used before. The more this happens, the more technology evolves to become the essential thing it is today.

As ideas get compounded to form new technologies, these new technologies are set up to become components of future new technologies, and so on, and so forth. Existing technologies evolve into something far more powerful and greater than we had before.

With the fast speed of technological evolution, it is no wonder many people have struggled to keep up. Here is a brief overview that shows just how rapidly the Internet, and technology as a whole have evolved in recent years.

Looking back to the 1990’s, the Internet was a new commodity that many, but not all, households and businesses had. For people living during that time, the sound of the painfully slow dial up signal connecting to the Internet is a not-so fond memory. As more people found value in the Internet, technology took off to eliminate having to use a phone line to go online and instead deliver faster connections to the World Wide Web.

Websites advanced with it. Suddenly, everyone had a Geocities or Tripod website dedicated to themselves. This is when the blogging craze started to set in on the consumer level.

Sharing information gradually started to become easier. Instead of handing over a floppy disc, or CD-ROM, people began emailing documents or storing large files on USB sticks.

As new technologies started to pop-up, each technology would compound and build to form a better, faster, and stronger piece of technology. With this fast development, the Internet changed the way people live, work, and operate today.

The Present

Since the days of dial up, access to the Internet has popped up almost everywhere. It is rare these days that consumers can go into a coffee shop, library, or any place of business and not be able to access a Wi-Fi signal. If there isn’t a Wi-Fi signal in close range, most people still have access to the Internet via their cellular data connection on their smartphones.

With this anywhere/anytime access to the Internet, businesses have created web applications that answer common needs of consumers. These applications can do everything from tracking food portions to sending massive amounts of information in a click of a button.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference in the Internet today is the ability to be personable in such an impersonal setting. Social networks have changed the way people engage with one another. Now, the way people connect with one another has changed to a more superficial setting online. Although superficial, this form of communication has helped people stay closer to each other when they would have otherwise lost contact.

Face-to-face conversations are easier too. With more people engaging in web/video conferencing online, geographic barriers that once hindered communication have been torn down. Instead, companies can engage with consumers in a more human manner, people can talk to people face-to-face without the need for costly travel, and reaching out to people all over the world is faster and easier.

With so many new technologies permeating the way people access information and access each other, the forward momentum looks promising for future technological developments.

As more existing technologies are stacked onto each other and developed into something greater, consumers and businesses alike can expect to see more opportunity with future technology. Technology will be faster, have the ability to accomplish more, and everything will become more streamlined to make getting work done, easier.

Smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets, will continue to evolve to work better together. These machines will share data automatically limiting the need for human involvement.

More people and companies will use cloud services for their business, or store everything online instead of on a single device. This has enormous potential to change the way business is done, the way the traditional office looks, and how people interact with companies on a regular basis.

The more technology continues to evolve, the more the world will change, creating new habits, and forming new ways of working together.

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Technology: Then and Now

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Cite this chapter

• Kimberly Williams 5 , 6 ,
• John M. Facciola 7 , 8 ,
• Peter McCann 9 , 10 &
• Vincent M. Catanzaro 11  

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How did we understand technology twenty years ago? How do we understand technology now? Where will we be in another twenty years? Will there be a video clip of us at which future generations laugh due to our current lack of comprehension? Will we still call it a “video clip?”

With the ‘a’ and then the ring around it . What is internet anyway? What, do you write to it like mail? I have no desire to be a part of the Internet . Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric (NBC 1994)

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See, Appendix A. Case Study: Network Security.

See, Appendix B. Case Study: Backdoor Access.

Model Rule 1.1 States: A lawyer shall provide competent representation to a client. Competent representation requires the legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation. Comment 8, To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology, engage in continuing study and education and comply with all continuing legal education requirements to which the lawyer is subject. (Emphasis added.)

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Williams, K., Facciola, J.M., McCann, P., Catanzaro, V.M. (2017). Technology: Then and Now. In: The Legal Technology Guidebook. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54523-3_7

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Technology Now and Then

The modern societies have changed drastically over the past fifty years in regard on technology. The societies have become an information world where technology is almost everything as opposed to the past. Technology has changed and advanced a great deal presently compared to the earlier periods. Nowadays, it affects human life in different areas; for instance, it brings social change, educational change, agricultural change, and change in leisure activities among others.

Industrial Revolution and Technology

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Trade and Technology

In the past, the majority of the businesses were done locally and counting done manually. Technology has quickly changed the way people trade since the business people nowadays use internets, calculators, telephone, mobile forms, and airplanes (Klein, 2008). In the past, carrying goods to the marketplaces were done by people themselves or by use of animals such as donkeys, camels, and even cows (Klein, 2008). Presently, the trade industry has improved a great deal due to technology changes because traders can use vehicles and airplanes to transport and supply goods to the consumers. Starting a business in the past needed no registration since the technology was in its minimal form. On the other hand, when starting a business presently, registration is done in the local business registration offices, and a business name is applied using the computers with internets. In addition, with the birth of the internet, businesspersons can conduct international trade while they are in their countries without traveling all the way. This could not be done in the past as it forced the traders to travel all the way in order to take their goods and interact with the consumers.

Agriculture and Technology

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Education and Technology

Compared to the past, technology has estimably changed education. Teaching methods have advanced from ancient times to nowadays. In the past, science was taught through recitation method where learners memorized the machines without seeing them. But now, technology has led to the invention of laboratory, observation method, and fieldwork method with adequate laboratory facilities where science students can now observe the machines. In the past, some subjects were not included in the syllabus; for example, Information Technology. But due to advancement in technology, these topics have been added in the syllabus today. With this knowledge, the students now learn how to use computers (Zelkowitz, 2006). Thanks to technology advancements, students in schools around the world can learn using the computers. In the past, the students had to attend classes in person since there were no computers or laptops. Presently, with the invention of e-learning, students are able to learn online which is easier compared to the past (Hutchby, 2001).

Transport and Technology

In the past, people used animals such as camels, donkeys, horses, and cattle to travel from one area to another. This has changed with the Technology Revolution. Today, technology has invented machines, which make travelling easier than before, as they are quick and save time. Moreover, advancement in technology has led to the development of vehicles and trains, which people can use to travel to far places (Klein, 2008). There are also motorcycles and bicycles, which help people to travel on land. Presently, there are airplanes, jets, rockets, and airstrips, which people use to travel on air unlike in the past. In the past, people used boats, which were locally made to travel on water. These boats took a lot of time and needed a lot of energy to operate. But today, with the technology, many machines such as steamboats, ships, engine boats, and ferries have been invented (Klein, 2008). The invented machines now save time and energy and carry people as opposed to the earlier periods.

Communication and Technology

The types of medium people use to converse with one another have been advancing during the past years. The modes of communication have changed depending on the times, individual’s living situation, and advancement in technology (Klein, 2008). In the past, the types of communication technology devices have evolved from smoke signals and carrier pigeons to letters and telegrams. Later, in the 1800s, there was the invention of telegraphs, which brought about generational change in communication. Telegraph was the first main landmark in the development of communication technology (Zelkowitz, 2006). Today, people use efficient means of communication: mobile phones, e-mails, telephones, radio, cable television, and internet, which are faster than the ones used in the earlier periods. Nowadays, communication plays an important role in the public and private spheres as opposed to the past (Zelkowitz, 2006). Today, communication worldwide is at the tip of the finger and is factual. People use computers, Ipads, Blackberry playbooks, Tablets, and wireless internet to communicate instantly with the use of e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging, and video chats. Current technology makes communication continuous as it allows individuals to inarticulate themselves with a click of a button (Zelkowitz, 2006). People in the past were not exposed to the kind of technology that enabled face-to-face communication as today (Zelkowitz, 2006). Nowadays, people are able to communicate face to face despite the distance. For instance, one can have face-to-face communication through the application of 3G calls, Skype, and webcam (Hutchby, 2001). In ancient times, televisions were usually in optical screens, white and black images with few channels and with an antenna attached at the backs (Zelkowitz, 2006). But nowadays, there are varieties of televisions which appear in liquid crystal and plasma display. They have great sound systems and flat screens with clearer vision (Hutchby, 2001). The televisions also come in multitouch screens meaning we can control everything while watching. In conclusion, our everyday tasks have changed in one way or another due to technological advancement, and they are quickly becoming the norm. Numerous technological innovations have occurred since the beginning of humanity and contributed to the modern ones. The technological changes from the past to present always relate to survival needs like shelter, defense, or food. The technology revolution from the past to now helps in many aspects of our lives such as the economy, education, and health (Hutchby, 2001). Technological changes have positively driven civilization and changed cultural systems as it shapes and reflects the system’s values.

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Past and Present Technology then and Now: Past and Present Knowledge

How it works

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Past’s Contribution in Natural Science
• 3 Art’s Relationship with Past Knowledge
• 4.1 Bibliography

Introduction

Many people find identifying the thin line between present knowledge and past knowledge difficult. Most people will say that the present knowledge that we possess is dependent on past knowledge that has been carried on from the past. However, many of these people will agree that not all past knowledge that we have obtained is applicable to certain fields of study. Present knowledge is the knowledge of the current state that we possess and use in our day-to-day lives. Past knowledge is a prior shared knowledge, which we have been knowing for a longer period of time.

I define the word “wholly” as “fully” and the word “dependent” as “relying”. I interpreted the title as “Current knowledge is fully relying on prior shared knowledge.” This interpretation of mine has made me think about the cell theory in Biology and the atomic structure concept by Bohr in Chemistry, which helped me understand those scientific concepts better. However, I also thought of the field of arts, where people with no artistic knowledge can create artwork. The following essay will discuss to what extent our present knowledge depends on past knowledge with reference to AOKs of natural science and arts.

Past’s Contribution in Natural Science

I instantly thought of science subjects when I read the word “past knowledge,” as I learned a lot of scientific concepts with the help of laws and theories discovered by scientists in the past. In natural science, present scientific knowledge that we possess is structured from many factors, but past knowledge is the biggest contributor. The biology and Chemistry textbooks that I’ve been using for the past two years contain theories discovered by scientists way back, and we learn the basic concepts of science subjects based on those theories. Without the theories, the concepts we studied can be too broad and difficult to understand. To give an example, I learned the cell theory in Biology, which is a historical, scientific theory stating that cells are the basic structure / organizational unit of all organisms and that all cells arise from pre-existing cells. Three scientists in the past have come up with this theory, and we have been using this concept to better understand the cell, which is the basis of Biology. This theory is confirmed and widely agreed upon by the scientific community today, and future Biology students will come across this theory at one point in their lives. Without the theories, scientific concepts may not have existed. The discovery of cell theory has impacted later scientific discovery, such as the discovery of stem cells, which contributes to curing heart disease and Alzheimer’s.

Although early scientific discoveries impact later research in a positive manner, present scientific knowledge can be far from dependent on past knowledge. Some innovative medical technologies are pioneered in a process that does not depend on past knowledge but rather is unplanned and accidental. This shows that no past knowledge is necessary to create a technology to make our lives easier. X-ray machines are one example of this kind of technology. Before it was invented, bones that were broken and tumors in a patient’s body were treated with a doctor’s guess. The discovery of X-ray is thought to be a miracle as a German professor, Roentgen, removed air from a fluorescent light bulb-like tube and filled it with a special gas. When the high electric voltage was passed through the tube, the tube glowed. Then he tried covering the tube with black paper and noticed that the barium screen started to glow. This made him realize that this tube was emitting so-called “invisible light” or rays through an object. Later on, this discovery was called “X-ray,” and we use this technology on a daily basis whenever someone needs to have a check on their inner body condition. This technology has contributed to finding the injury and tumor inside a body earlier than ever before.

Art’s Relationship with Past Knowledge

Moreover, the field of arts also popped into my mind when I read the term “past knowledge.” Artwork is created by an artist inspired by another artist or technique from the past that they have learned while taking an art subject. With academic experience in arts, artists have a better understanding and a greater range of artistic knowledge compared to the ones with no artistic background. Painter Claude Monet, who is famous for his French impressionism artwork, turned down his father’s expectation of him to become a part of the family’s business to pursue his interest in arts. He enrolled in “Le Havre Secondary School of Arts” to continue his art study. He then meets Eugene, whom the former has considered the latter as his mentor, changing his approach towards his painting to the one we know Monet for. By having artistic knowledge and a mentor, one’s ability to paint a striking artwork widens. In addition, the revolutionary French impressionism art style by Monet is a style that students will study in their coursework, continuing to inspire future artists.

On the other hand, while art students must learn about the basic study of arts, people with no art experience or artistic knowledge can create their own artwork. Some types of art are determined by an artist’s imagination or observation, making the possession of artistic knowledge unnecessary to create an artwork. Art is a broad subject where there is no right or wrong, and artists can express whatever they want to express.

There is an article in which they asked 12 contemporary artists “What it takes to make a great piece of art.” One of the artists that were asked stated that “there’s no universal formula to create a piece of art.” Most of the artists in the article mentioned that they create their artwork based on their experiences and emotional connection as there were no determined ways how art is considered good. When I was an art student two years ago, I researched the painting style of Frida Kahlo and found out that she didn’t have actual artistic knowledge or degree by the time she started painting her iconic self-portraits. She was involved in an accident, making her stay at the hospital for many weeks. While staying in a hospital, she taught herself how to draw and paint to study the art herself. She later succeeded in painting her famous self-portrait and was exposed to the world of realism and abstract art. Nowadays, I see a lot of artists inspired by Kahlo’s unique artistic technique, including myself. It is possible to discover a new painting style and to create a world-recognized masterpiece for a person with no artistic background. To conclude, the present knowledge we possess at the moment is largely dependent on past knowledge because not only past knowledge is the determinant of present knowledge.

Though the line between present knowledge and past knowledge is really narrow, I believe that present knowledge is our instincts and sense perception, whereas past knowledge is our experience and historical knowledge, which has been passed on for many years. In natural science, it is likely that the present scientific knowledge we possess is dependent on past knowledge, as theories discovered by scientists help us to better understand complex scientific concepts. Although some innovative technologies are founded on sense perception and instincts, past knowledge is the biggest contributor to obtaining present knowledge in fields of natural science. In arts, past knowledge is not necessary to make one an artist. Artists with artistic and educational backgrounds are likely to have a wider ability to make use of artistic techniques to approach their ideal art style. Artworks are created through artists’ imagination and observation; thus, since there is no right or wrong when creating an artwork, artists are free to express their ideas directly as artwork. Therefore, I think that current knowledge is mostly dependent on past knowledge, but it is not necessary to have prior knowledge in order to obtain present knowledge.

Bibliography

• “Pearson Baccalaureate Higher Level 2nd Edition Print and eBook”, Patricia Tosto, Alan Damon, Randy McGonegal, William Ward, 5 Sep. 2014
• “Claude Monet Biography,” Editors TheFamousPeople.com, 26 Jul. 2017, https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/oscar-claude-monet-1084.php#childhood-&-early-life
• “The Discovery of X-Ray,” Medical Discovery News http://www.medicaldiscoverynews.com/shows/xray.html
• Stewart. Jessica, “12 Contemporary Artists Tell Us What it Takes to Make a Great Piece of Art”, My Modern Met, 24 Apr. 2017 https://mymodernmet.com/what-is-great-art/
• “Frida Kahlo.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 24 Feb. 2020, www.biography.com/artist/frida-kahlo.

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Technology is probably changing us for the worse—or so we always think

For nearly a hundred years in this publication (and long before that elsewhere) people have worried that new technologies could alter what it means to be human.

• Timothy Maher archive page

MIT Technology Review is celebrating our 125th anniversary with an online series that draws lessons for the future from our past coverage of technology. 

Do we use technology, or does it use us? Do our gadgets improve our lives or just make us weak, lazy, and dumb? These are old questions—maybe older than you think. You’re probably familiar with the way alarmed grown-ups through the decades have assailed the mind-rotting potential of search engines , video games , television , and radio —but those are just the recent examples.

Early in the last century, pundits argued that the telephone severed the need for personal contact and would lead to social isolation. In the 19th century some warned that the bicycle would rob women of their femininity and result in a haggard look known as “bicycle face.” Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein was a warning against using technology to play God, and how it might blur the lines between what’s human and what isn’t.

Or to go back even further: in Plato’s Phaedrus , from around 370 BCE, Socrates suggests that writing could be a detriment to human memory—the argument being, if you’ve written it down, you no longer needed to remember it.

We’ve always greeted new technologies with a mixture of fascination and fear,  says Margaret O’Mara , a historian at the University of Washington who focuses on the intersection of technology and American politics. “People think: ‘Wow, this is going to change everything affirmatively, positively,’” she says. “And at the same time: ‘It’s scary—this is going to corrupt us or change us in some negative way.’”

And then something interesting happens: “We get used to it,” she says. “The novelty wears off and the new thing becomes a habit.” 

A curious fact

Here at MIT Technology Review , writers have grappled with the effects, real or imagined, of tech on the human mind for nearly a hundred years. In our March 1931 issue , in his essay “Machine-Made Minds,” author John Bakeless wrote that it was time to ask “how far the machine’s control over us is a danger calling for vigorous resistance; and how far it is a good thing, to which we may willingly yield.” 

The advances that alarmed him might seem, to us, laughably low-tech: radio transmitters, antennas, or even rotary printing presses.

But Bakeless, who’d published books on Lewis and Clark and other early American explorers, wanted to know not just what the machine age was doing to society but what it was doing to individual people. “It is a curious fact,” he wrote, “that the writers who have dealt with the social, economic, and political effects of the machine have neglected the most important effect of all—its profound influence on the human mind.”

In particular, he was worried about how technology was being used by the media to control what people thought and talked about. 

“Consider the mental equipment of the average modern man,” he wrote. “Most of the raw material of his thought enters his mind by way of a machine of some kind … the Twentieth Century journalist can collect, print, and distribute his news with a speed and completeness wholly due to a score or more of intricate machines … For the first time, thanks to machinery, such a thing as a world-wide public opinion is becoming possible.”

Bakeless didn’t see this as an especially positive development. “Machines are so expensive that the machine-made press is necessarily controlled by a few very wealthy men, who with the very best intentions in the world are still subject to human limitation and the prejudices of their kind … Today the man or the government that controls two machines—wireless and cable—can control the ideas and passions of a continent.”

Fifty years later, the debate had shifted more in the direction of silicon chips. In our October 1980 issue , engineering professor Thomas B. Sheridan, in “Computer Control and Human Alienation,” asked: “How can we ensure that the future computerized society will offer humanity and dignity?” A few years later, in our August/September 1987 issue , writer David Lyon felt he had the answer—we couldn’t, and wouldn’t. In “Hey You! Make Way for My Technology,” he wrote that gadgets like the telephone answering machine and the boom box merely kept other pesky humans at a safe distance: “As machines multiply our capacity to perform useful tasks, they boost our aptitude for thoughtless and self-centered action. Civilized behavior is predicated on the principle of one human being interacting with another, not a human being interacting with a mechanical or electronic extension of another person.”

By this century the subject had been taken up by a pair of celebrities, novelist Jonathan Franzen and Talking Heads lead vocalist David Byrne. In our September/October 2008 issue, Franzen suggested that cell phones had turned us into performance artists. 

In “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” he wrote: “When I’m buying those socks at the Gap and the mom in line behind me shouts ‘I love you!’ into her little phone, I am powerless not to feel that something is being performed; overperformed; publicly performed; defiantly inflicted. Yes, a lot of domestic things get shouted in public which really aren’t intended for public consumption; yes, people get carried away. But the phrase ‘I love you’ is too important and loaded, and its use as a sign-off too self-conscious, for me to believe I’m being made to hear it accidentally.”

In “Eliminating the Human,” from our September/October 2017 issue, Byrne observed that advances in the digital economy served largely to free us from dealing with other people. You could now “keep in touch” with friends without ever seeing them; buy books without interacting with a store clerk; take an online course without ever meeting the teacher or having any awareness of the other students.

“For us as a society, less contact and interaction—real interaction—would seem to lead to less tolerance and understanding of difference, as well as more envy and antagonism,” Byrne wrote. “As has been in evidence recently, social media actually increases divisions by amplifying echo effects and allowing us to live in cognitive bubbles … When interaction becomes a strange and unfamiliar thing, then we will have changed who and what we are as a species.”

Modern woes

It hasn’t stopped. Just last year our own Will Douglas Heaven’s feature on ChatGPT debunked the idea that the AI revolution will destroy children’s ability to develop critical-thinking skills.

As O’Mara puts it: “Do all of the fears of these moral panics come to pass? No. Does change come to pass? Yes.” The way we come to grips with new technologies hasn’t fundamentally changed, she says, but what has changed is—there’s more of it to deal with. “It’s more of the same,” she says. “But it’s more. Digital technologies have allowed things to scale up into a runaway train of sorts that the 19 th century never had to contend with.”

Maybe the problem isn’t technology at all, maybe it’s us. Based on what you might read in 19th-century novels, people haven’t changed much since the early days of the industrial age. In any Dostoyevsky novel you can find people who yearn to be seen as different or special, who take affront at any threat to their carefully curated public persona, who feel depressed and misunderstood and isolated, who are susceptible to mob mentality.

“The biology of the human brain hasn’t changed in the last 250 years,” O’Mara says. “Same neurons, still the same arrangement. But it’s been presented with all these new inputs … I feel like I live with information overload all the time. I think we all observe it in our own lives, how our attention spans just go sideways. But that doesn’t mean my brain has changed at all. We’re just getting used to consuming information in a different way.”

And if you find technology to be intrusive and unavoidable now, it might be useful to note that Bakeless felt no differently in 1931. Even then, long before anyone had heard of smartphone or the internet, he felt that technology had become so intrinsic to daily life that it was like a tyrant: “Even as a despot, the machine is benevolent; and it is after all our stupidity that permits inanimate iron to be a despot at all.”

If we are to ever create the ideal human society, he concluded—one with sufficient time for music, art, philosophy, scientific inquiry (“the gorgeous playthings of the mind,” as he put it)—it was unlikely we’d get it done without the aid of machines. It was too late, we’d already grown too accustomed to the new toys. We just needed to find a way to make sure that the machines served us instead of the other way around. “If we are to build a great civilization in America, if we are to win leisure for cultivating the choice things of mind and spirit, we must put the machine in its place,” he wrote.

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Home / Essay Samples / Life / Life Goals / Contrasting Life in the Past and Now

Contrasting Life in the Past and Now

• Category: Life
• Topic: Finding Yourself , Life Goals

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Technology and innovation, communication and connectivity, education and learning, societal norms and values.

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