How Has Technology Changed in the Last 100 Years? Advancement of Technology, from Horses to Automobile, from the First Generation (1G) to the Fifth generation network (5G), from cell phones to high-end Smartphone’s, we are witnessing how technology is advancing over time as we are the biggest beneficiaries of Technological Advancement.
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and the Internet of Things, these techs are ruling the advance technology region for the last couple of years, let’s see “How Has Technology Changed in the Last 100 Years?”
How fast is technology advancing?
Technology is advancing really fast. The blessing of tech is flourishing every sector out there. The huge amount of investment in Research & Development is really paying it back. There are plenty of examples of the fast pacing of technology. Some examples are
Battery
One of the biggest reasons behind the failure of the First Smartphone was its really short battery backup. From, 1992 to 2020, the battery backup has improved substantially, no one can deny that! While the first Smartphone struggled badly due to its 30 min battery backup, now we can see smartphones having massive battery up to 6000 mAh.
A fully charged Smartphone’s battery can serve up to a couple of days of back up in terms of talk time and standability which was unimaginable once. Technology has revolutionized battery development, providing us with the best service to date.
From, 30 min minutes to a couple of days are worth a backup facility in just 25 years! How fast it has developed would you like to think? Pretty fast eh?
Smartphone Technology
Now a day, smartphones are capable of recording 8Kvideo, offering 120Hz display facility, 16GB LPDDR5 RAM, 1Terabyte of ROM, and some other pretty amazing features. We cannot even pass a day without using our Smartphone which is now both affordable and contains a lot of features.
But the journey of the first Smartphone was not so smooth. It did not have a lot of features like today’s Smartphone and it was costly. The Simon Personal Communicator had 1MB of ram, very limited 3rd party app usage facility, very short battery life, and some other limitations with a pretty substantial amount of cost $899 in 1994.
Due to the fast tech advancements, we are now capable of using smartphones with so many features within a pretty reasonable price. In, 28 years the advancement of tech has brought to us a 1TB of memory from a couple of Megabytes which is pretty amazing comparing to some other awesome features of smartphones.
The Smartphone industry has developed really fast and made it one of our most essential daily companions.
Autonomous Vehicle
We are now living in the era of an autonomous vehicle, capable of driving without any human assistance fully automatically. Yeah, it is still a little far for fully autonomous Stage 5, automation as the law still does not permit it but we are seeing the fully capable autonomous vehicle. The autonomous vehicle is a pure blessing of technology.
The tech behind the autonomous vehicle has developed pretty fast. Although in the time frame it may seem a little slow pace innovation of tech but comparing with the ultimate capability, it was not long for the development for such an awesome facility.
Space Technology: A Revolutionary example of Technological Advancement
Space tech is one of the most advanced technologies ever. Plenty of people have recently seen the event of SpaceX, a first-ever private company sending humans to space which is giving us a strong glimpse of COMMERCIAL SPACE TOURISM AND EXPLORATION. Commercial space tourism is not a dream anymore, there is pretty solid backed up the reality on commercial space tourism and exploration.
We are quite familiar with the International Space Station. The space station is the 3rd brightest object in the sky, which is even visible with the naked eye from the ground. NASA even has a widget called ‘Spot the Station’ which allows users to find out when the space station will pass over their location, a pretty cool thing, eh?
The reason behind talking about the International space station is that several space tourists have already traveled the space station apart from only astronauts. And, one of the prime motives of International Space Station was to ease up the transportation and maintenance for future missions to the moon, Mars and asteroids.
Due to the fast-paced space tech, mission Mars and colonizing on Mars cloud be a possible reality in the near future, as the technology has advanced really fast for Space Technology.
Is technology advancement eco friendly?
Our environments have been suffering pretty badly due to the huge amount of environmental pollution. Climate change and global warming have been a massive threat to the environment. This raises the questions
Are the advancements of technology eco friendly? Or it is causing harm to our environment?
As the environment is one of our prime concerns, the developer of new tech is trying to make the tech as eco friendly as possible.
Electric Cars
We are now in the era of electric cars. Most of the new vehicles are now coming with the only option of electricity as a fuel. Tesla’s vehicles are some examples of electric care which is gaining huge popularity.
One of the best features of an electric vehicle is its more eco-friendly nature. Electric cars are more eco friendly than the usual gas-powered vehicle. Electric Cars don’t emit greenhouse gas, greenhouse gas is really harmful to our environment and Electric cars can ease that problem a little.
There are plenty of vehicles emitting harmful gases on our environment making it more polluted every day. If electric cars could reduce that problem even a little, wouldn’t it be better for everyone and especially for our Environment?
LED Lights
ENERGY, a very important term in our life. We have been introduced with the modern LED lights which are very much energy efficient and produces way less heat comparing to the traditional lights. The wider adoption of LED light could save plenty of amount of energy.
The eco friendly LED light bulbs could replace a traditional lamp of 400W by 160W and still can produce the same amount of light. These LED lights will be very beneficial by reducing energy consumption and being energy efficient.
Wastewater Treatment
Technologies like microbial fuel cells, nanotechnology, development of biological treatments, etc. are trying vigorously to make water drinkable and significantly reduce the pollutants from products being discharged into the sea.
There are plenty of examples of eco-friendly technology and technology trying to minimize the harm caused by a harmful substance to our environment. So, yeah technology advancement is eco friendly, after all a healthy environment matters a lot.
7 Examples of Technological Advancements:
- 1G To 5G: From the 1980s to 2020s, we see a significant change in the Generation. From the 1G delivered analogue voice to high speed, superior reliability and lower latency, 5G is going to provide the best connectivity with more assurance.
- This new decade is going to be the decade of 5G; it has already started in 2019 wherein 2020 it is going to be broadly dispersed everywhere, most of the new Smartphone’s are coming with 5G enabled technologies. 5G is going to be 100X faster than the last 4G network with more uptime and low latency. Solely due to the Technological Advancement, we are now able to use Super fast, high speed data with greater availability.
- Fuel Cells: We may not hear a lot about this, but this is a massive leap towards the future as it would be very much environment friendly. A fuel cell device converts potential chemical energy to electrical energy, and the cell uses hydrogen and oxygen as fuel. Fuel cells are emerging as a highly efficient and environmentally friendly electricity-producing device. This is different and a significant improvement over combustion engines, coal-burning power plants and nuclear power plants as these yields harmful by-products which are dangerous for our environment. It is a magic of Technological Advancement.
- Medical 3D Printing: Medical 3D printing showing huge potential. 3D printed prosthetics, 3D printed eyes, 3D printing organs; these are giving us high hopes as the technology showed us that it is possible to print devices working exactly like our living organs. This could be one great solution to the problem of organ donation as a lack of organ donors is a big deal in organ donation. This technological advancement could make our future much better and much easier for the survival of the human.
- AI-powered Chatbot’s: Artificial Intelligence yet in another form of Chatbot playing a significant role as people are getting more familiar with it. From personal assistant to multiple sales rep to lead qualifying, chatbots are everywhere now a day. These are getting more popularities as these are powered by Artificial Intelligence and capable of answering every basic query.
- One of the most significant negative sides of chatbots is that it is taking call centre jobs and replacing humans. These chatbots are going to be potential alternatives to humans in the sector of customer interaction making human jobs obsolete in this sector.
- Blockchain For Security: BlockChain for security gaining quite an importance as it is very effective for security purpose of securing data, network, identities, critical infrastructure and many more. It is being used in a various number of security application. It is a safe technology, and its use is increasing pretty vastly.
- Automobile Technology: The driving situation hasn’t changed much as the looks and appearance of cars changed in the last 100 years. Well, the change has already started. Automation in driving is a significant change in the last couple of years. Cars are being driven automatically without human drivers.
- Technology in developing vaccines: Vaccines are essentials to prevent us from getting infected with deadly viruses. Vaccine development traditionally takes a lot of times, in the past scenario; we have seen a vaccine taking up to 10-15 years for its development. Artificial intelligence is largely being used in vaccine development.
Although technologies are changing the time frame for development, yet it will take some time as it requires a lot of research and trials for its development. Advance Healthcare Technology is making it a bit easier as we can see the estimated development of Covid19 Vaccines time has reduced to a year where usually vaccines take 2-5 years to even in speedy development.
In the near future, as the technology advances there would not be any need of people deriving their vehicle, it will all be automatic. The new cars are coming with this automation technology capable of driving more efficiently without human controlling is a significant advancement in this sector.
Technology is advancing very rapidly. New technologies are developing every day, making people’s lives easier and more comfortable.
How Technological advancement changing Society:
These advancements are making our society a better place, for instance, fuel cell technology will help the environment by not contaminating it. Automation tech is making driving human driver-free, and eventually, it is supposed to reduce accidents, making our society a better place. Although Technological Advancement is going to take Jobs from human as tech is replacing humans in some sector which a massive drawback of technology.
Challenges of technological advancements
The impacts of tech advancement are massive, we all know that. But there are some challenges associated with the advancements of tech. Some of these are
Massive initial investment:
The return of investment in the tech-related product is really high. But the start-up cost for the sake of development is one of the barriers or challenges towards the development of tech. Tech requires a pretty huge amount of initial investment.
For example, cloud computing a great feature of tech, there is no doubt about it. But for a small business, it is kind of difficult to maintain the high cost of adjustment. Although, in the long run, it might be quite beneficial with all the service but still it is pretty costly to get settled up and move the business over the cloud.
Not just cloud computing, in the development of new tech it takes years of research and a massive amount of money for its development which is another challenge of technological advancement.
Security threat and vulnerabilities
One of the most major challenges of tech is the security issue associated with it. Technology is making our lives a better one by all its facilities that is true. But, the security risk is pretty high in tech. For example, an autonomous vehicle can get hacked and can cause a lot of chaos; data stored over the cloud can get hacked and destroyed. Tech has always been a little vulnerable in the security issue as
NO SYSTEM IS EVER COMPLETELY SAFE, although the risks are being eliminated and developers are doing everything to ensure the proper security and remove the vulnerabilities. But, in the negative side technology will always have security limitations; it is not quite possible to remove every security barrier completely.
The fear of being replaced
This may seem a little off a bit, but the fear of losing a job and being replaced is one of the facts behind the slow adoption of advanced technology. As more advanced technology is making the workplace automatic. Due to the automation, development of Artificial Intelligence, utilization IoT (Internet of Things) tech, a lot of people is going to lose jobs and going to get replaced by tech developed robots.
The adoption of advanced tech in healthcare has been slow, especially in the process of automation in healthcare. Healthcare professionals were a bit reluctant in adapting to the automation process lead by tech in healthcare as the rise of tech might possess some serious risk to the roles played by healthcare professionals.
Not only in healthcare, in many other sectors, but the reluctance of workers to welcome advance tech also slowed down the adoption process of new tech.
Conclusion
In this article, we have given information on “How Has Technology Changed in the Last 100 Years?” There is no doubt technology is shaping our society in better shape. All modern technology is making our lives easier. Technology has brought great comfort in our life. Although there are some drawbacks, the positive impact is huge in our life.