Not long ago, a cover story named “Thinking Of The Next Ten Years” published on the American Time Magazine predicted ten development tendencies in next ten years, they are: the next “American Century”; re-dividing world pattern; the bandwidth will become the new black gold; school dropout economy; Sino-US relations, the indispensable axle center in the world; excuse failure; the anxiety crisis of the white race; television will save the world; eliting teams will decline and a boring era. This article is written by a group of researchers working in “New American Foundation” of the United States.
Some media has discussed on previous several tendencies, but few people would refer to the last tendency. Michael Linder, the author of “The Boring Age” is an economic plans policy chief of the New American Foundation. He put forward “The Boring Age” is because: on the one hand, “The Boring Age” is compared with the future Chinese Century; on the other hand, “The Boring Age” is based on his predicted views that the influence of the technologies in the future ten years on people’s lives will be in a stage of a standstill.
Whether you can agree with the Michael Linder’s predicts? The cynicism he made to the “Chinese Century”, surely I can not agree with him. But on present trends of technology development, his views are also specific analysis.
Linder believes: “We would feel frustrated if we re-watch the film ‘2001 Space Odyssey’ directed by Stanley Kubrick in 2010. According to this film made in 1968, people had ever envisaged that there should be immigrants to the moon and widespread tourism in space by 2010. To any people who devote oneself to automatically receive information or programmable TV, like the computer HAL9000 in that film, the computers today would be out of mind and even dumb.”
Certainly, the speed of technological development is far from the speed people expected four decades ago. US President Barack Obama recently has decided to cancel the program of returning to the moon which has shown that the space technology development is facing numerous difficulties.
All right, the estimation of effect of technology being badly lagged behind made by Linder is substantially correct. Previous technological revolutions, including railway, generate electricity, steel production, telegram and automobiles, etc., have experienced a long times period from development to growth. The ITI (Information Technology Industry) also is going through the same routine, only a shorter cycle of its transformation, but rise and fall big.
0 comments:
Post a Comment