The Disruptor

The World is changing faster than at any time in history. In the past fifteen years, technological innovation has advanced more than in the previous two thousand years combined. The use of technology is everywhere. Modern life as we know it, could not exist today without technology. 

The world population currently stands at over seven billion people. Feeding such numbers relies heavily on the use of the latest technology; from the farmer in the field, with his highly advanced GPS guided combine harvester, to the supermarket checkout that uses barcode scanning equipment; all is made possible through recent advances in technology. 

Beyond the canon ball and musket, our countries have, for many years, been defended by technology; every naval ship, military utility vehicle, guided missile, light armament and now drones, are driven by technology.

Even the mass-produced synthetic clothes we wear and the gluten free food we eat are made possible through technology. Cars, aeroplanes, trains and all other forms of transport, have been mass produced using technology, which is also extensively incorporated within dashboards, warning systems, monitoring systems and navigation systems. 

Look around your kitchen and count how many items have an onboard microprocessor and then count the items that could not have been manufactured without the use of technology. Ninety-nine per cent of what we produce today is technology dependent – the fresh food in the refrigerator has probably been harvested using some form of technology, sorted and packaged by technology and distributed by a vehicle using technology. Even the refrigerator used to store the food is driven by technology.

Face it, the Industrial Revolution was just the tip of the iceberg. Who would have thought that just one hundred and fifty years later, this revolution and its attendant massive increase in the burning of fossil fuels would be regarded as the catalyst behind global warming? And yet mankind is on the cutting edge of the greatest period of technological advancement never imagined by even the greatest of innovators and scientists.

What makes this all scary, is that the world is truly only a few years, in relative terms, into the 4th Industrial Revolution – The Digital Revolution!  The Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Advanced Humanoid Robotics, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Drone Technology and many more, whilst having been in use for some time, are only just emerging into the mainstream. And Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) might just be biggest disruptor of all if only the masses could grasp its potential.  

As humans, we find it hard to put our phones aside for a few moments to concentrate on the real world. Our heads are constantly down, scanning social media for news of something or nothing. Modern technology is critical to our way of life, but our way of life, of living, is also u...