5th Lesson

Another lesson of TWC just ended. Today's the first time we focused on only one topic instead of 2. Pretty content heavy, but at least we didn't need to stretch our brain cells for 2 topics :).

The issue of ICT was the topic of discussion, with the class looking at the various forms of ICT, the various applications of ICT and their implications on society. Most interestingly was how gaming was considered in itself a form of ICT, seeing as the majority of people considered it more of a recreational pastime that's largely irrelevant to our daily lives. Yet, we were shown a video in which the Kinect system of the Xbox 360, its software named Project Natal, was able to simulate an entirely virtual world and allowed us to interact with it. The video showed interaction with a boy created entirely out of the software, yet had emotions and reacted like a normal human being. The most fascinating observation I felt was when the boy invited the tester to touch the "water". The Kinect system device picked up the tester's movements and translated it accordingly into the virtual world, with ripples forming and fish moving away when the tester touched the screen.

I also realised that productivity increases from ICT developments, originally very high, have been slowly decreasing as each development is met. The diagram showed that our productivity gain from hunter societies to agriculture and the domestication of animals was 25 times, similar to that from an agricultural society to the industrial revolution. However, the productivity gain from the industrial revolution to our current ICT developments, labelled the "Knowledge Revolution", only increased by 5%. This got me thinking: could it be possible that our rapid developments into ICT have already stretched any more productivity gains in the future? What I mean is that any further developments in ICT would result in a less than proportionate productivity gain. We may very well have reached the limit of our IT innovation.

From the discussions of this lesson, I learnt that while the possibilities and advantages of technology may be limitless, we must take care in employing such technologies. This is because the future implications of current innovations can hardly be predicted in current times. For example, no one would have expected that advance in social media such as Facebook would eventually become so dominant today. As such, the lesson that we all should realise would be to always be wary of the current technologies we have today.

As for other issues for discussion, I feel that the point that I raised above, about the declining productivity gain, could have been an interesting discussion topic.

I would rate the lesson an 8/10. Issues are getting more intriguing each passing lesson…