Did You Know?
One of my students posted the following in an online discussion. I urge you to have a look and think about the possible implications.
"I was sent this video from my friends mom who is an elementary school teacher. Basically the video is a did you know... and it evaluates what is coming in our near future. There is evidence and prediction that in our lifetime computers will be able to supersede the human brain, and eventually be able to supersede the human race. It is predicted that technology will change every 72 hours within the next 10-20 years. Although a little off topic i believe this information is vital to MIS and the global shipping business. How will businesses strategise an MIS system that could be outdated in less than a year or possibly less than a month? I suggest everybody looks at this video its a windows media document.
http://www.scottmcleod.org/didyouknow.wmv"
James Drogan
1 Comment
Reader Comments (1)
A couple or three points to bear in mind - this has been going on for a while and is true but not deep. There may be lots of new data but it still needs to be sorted and organized which is a frontier. I've also found that the approaches I've recently learned and just finished systemetizing have deep roots. We're still burning down the barn to catch the rats in IT, Logistics, and general business management.
Chandler points out that a Baltimore merchant of 1830 lived in a commercial world with practices that Italian merchants of 1300 would have recogized (after suitable historical review) I'd add or an Arab merchant in Cairo around 800 a.d. or a Phoenician merchant of around 2500 b.c.e. Yet by 1870/1880 the new world was such that business practices had changed so much that that merchant would no longer have been able to function. In other words when you look at industrialization, technology, social changes there were more deep structural changes in the most advanced societies between 1880-1920 than since (or before for millenia).
The real question is how do we adapt to these changes - which fall largely under the rubric of 'noise' to me - and invent, innovate and adopt new initiatives. However if you want to consider real change the entry - as the video implies - of China and India as sophisticated participants in the world economy is THE biggest structural change we've seen in 500 years:
From our guru Prof. A.Smith -
China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world. It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times. It had perhaps, even long before his time, acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permits it to acquire…The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe.