Session Two

The Colonial Holocaust and its Legacy. Initially, the content and its link to Technology and World Change seemed superfluous tome. Why learn about our ancestors’ deeds and our bloody history, when we have high-tech gadgets to confer about? As it has been very kindly clarified for us, technology is interwoven in our daily mechanics. It is a revelation for me that technology is not exclusive but something that is very integral in our day to day lives.

The aforementioned article, describes the brutality of Europeans and how the indigenous people of Latin America and India were massacred. The insistence of European dominance, including military, economic, political and cultural, had the non- European populations severely exploited. Consequently, the Europeans profited from the vast looting and plundering of these natives’ states. This is where it struck me, the reason why Europe was the rising power in colonial times. Reflecting back upon the Jared Diamond’s book on Guns, Germs and Steel and Yali’s question that it revolves around of why the whites have more cargo than the New Guineans, brutal force of the Europeans could possibly be one of the answers. It seemed that they were a force to reckon with, especially in technological innovation.

Very interesting presentations were done up by my peers and one of them caught my attention, on Singularity and computers that are smarter than humans. Humans are forever and always looking for ways to live beyond and into immortality. Super-computers could be created that function as our support and life as we grow older. The questions posed and discussed, is what the impacts will be if we are half-human and half-computerised. The direction of the discussion was mainly on the intuition, feelings and emotions, or the lack thereof, in computers. It was shocking to find out that there are chips manufactures to invoke feelings in a computer. It is way out-of-the world and eccentric and unbelievable to have computers do that. The identity of humans is at stake as its unique ability to feel and respond is duplicated by computers. I might be a stickler for constancy but are we harming ourselves and our future with our own hands, as we might get dominated by computers?

The key take away points in this lesson is that to understand and better apply our knowledge in our daily lives, we need to find out the history of how it all began. Without that knowledge we might just end up being slaves of technology, instead of manipulating it to our suitability.

Another key take away is anything seems possible with upcoming technologies. Crazy as it sounds, even robots with feelings. The dynamics of the world might change and it might be anytime soon.

For the pure craziness of ideas that are the crux of class discussions that continually surprise me, I rate the session a 10 yet again!

Session One

When I first looked through what the professor had put up for introduction questions just the day before the first class, I was a little shocked with his second question. He wanted to know what we currently knew about technology and world change and if we had any special interest. I was wondering if I was expected to have read extensively before class and was supposed to give a very intellectual answer. I suddenly was not looking forward to the class as much as before because my knowledge regarding technology was limited and special interest was totally out of question. However, I felt better after hearing many of the answers. A large number of students were actually admitting that they did not have a lot of knowledge on technology and were there to learn. This got me more relaxed as I felt less dumb.

The professor slowly introduced us to the course through some videos. I was shocked to find out the extent of technology’s impact on the world, especially after looking at facts in videos that were just few years apart from each other. The change in statistics was huge. We then went through the “timeline of time” which was very interesting as we got to see how the world has evolved from the start till now.

The main topic we touched on was a book written by Jared Diamond (Gun, Germs and Steel). The book was based on a question put forward to Diamond by a New Guinean. The question was: Why did white men have so much cargo and New Guineans so little? Diamond then rephrased the question according to what he felt was the root to the question: Why did some societies advance faster than others? The professor then put this question to the rest of the class. Some of the answers were:

-          Some societies got more exposure to different technologies and advancements by travelling. And they improve on these advancements.

-          Some societies had the ability to read and write while some didn’t.

-          Some societies could only advance with whatever resources that were available to them.

What I found interesting was that none of these answers actually answered the question to the point. For example the first point: It doesn’t answer why those societies who travelled were able to travel but not the other societies. It made me realize that as simple as the question and as obvious as the answers seemed earlier, it was a lot more complicated.

We could not go through the rest of the book or other articles provided but after reading them I felt that the first key takeaway from all the articles was the importance of farming. What we are today as compared to Stone Age times is largely due to farming. A simple tool to survive led to such huge developments such as advancement in technology and even social changes. The second key takeaway was that contrary to the traditional view that it was the whites who were pioneers of technological innovation, it was actually the natives of the Middle Eastern continent who sparked of the start of these advancements. Especially the article titled, “Science and Technology: Historic Innovation, Modern Solutions”, shows that many of today’s technologies originated from non-European scholars/scientists and were used as references/guides by the Europeans.

I would rate the class on a scale of 10. Because it has opened my mind up to a lot of different thing I had never considered or bothered about. And also these questions were not bombarded on us but instead we were slowly introduced to them.