We can visibly see all the effects of technological change if we try to look around our environment that we are living. Everything we see from the smallest grain of cement to the tallest towers and commercial buildings, high powered weapons, fast running cars and airplanes, supercomputers and super portable mobile phones and gadgets are all the product of years of continuous hard work, research and experiments and a lot of luck of those people with such genius minds from the past and spent their lifetime developing such technologies. What we enjoy in the present were all legacy of such marvelous people and geniuses of the past. Clearly, the development of technologies and its continuous change had changed the way people are living today in all aspects of life I believe; physically, emotionally, morally and spiritually. Technological change was such a powerful force that drives changes to civilization. From the simple living people knew, it turns into a very complex yet productive living no one would ever imagined will exist.
Technological change had brought lots of effects to the society in general. These effects are evident and very obvious if we try to navigate the world history. Whether good or bad, positive or negative, these effects have a very huge impact and influence on what our society looked today.
Below are some of the technological effects in our society.
The continuous but rapid changes in technology had resulted human needs and lifestyle to constantly but also rapidly changing. Human will never be contented as many of us believed. This belief was well justified by the rapid changes in technology because of human consumption. But this human dynamics when it comes to their needs played a very important role of what technology looks like today. Innovations were such unbelievable. In fact, there are a lot of human needs that leads to technological change. Man needed a device that can be used in communication that is faster that the old fashioned mailing system. Years later, with the discovery of the concept of electricity developed what we knew today as the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. Later human needs a portable communication device than the bulky telephone and because of this needs gave birth to a much more portable and inexpensive concept of modern telephony, the cellular telephone or cell phone. In the field of transportation, human needs to travel and deliver goods to far places as fast as they could leads to the invention of steam engine by James Watt that replaced the old cart pulled by animals. The needs of human again has changed for a faster yet convenient means of transportation hence, together with the development of fossil fuels, automobile using fuels were invented. More and more ambitious means of transportation were developed like trains, airplanes that conquered the sky and allowed human travel from country to country fast and convenient. These among other technological innovations in different fields marked a statement that it is the human needs that drives technological change. However, there are some factors that human didn't anticipated. Because of the impact that technology provided to human, although it is still continuous but the human needs changed very fast than the usual. It is the demand that created technology.
It is the technology that created the demand. Sounds contradicting from the previous isn't it? But before you raise your eyebrows and starts an argument, let me state first some scenarios and examples that somehow proves that statement. Yes, demand creates technology and no questions about that, but because of the numerous advantages it provides to human, the trend suddenly reversed but not totally erased. We cannot deny the fact that technology was created to serve a purpose and that is to serve human needs. But technology has crossed beyond borders and conquered every human being. Technological change was such a dominating force that conquered everything in this world and creating a demand is one of them. The best example of technology that created the demand is the internet.
The internet's primary goal of creation was to provide a shared connection and information around the US ARPA. Actually it is really not a primary need of human,a non commodity in short. But as more had used the technology such as the academic sector and some companies, it suddenly become a new and very significant technology where a lot of things could be done. As the majority from the academe, the government and the industry are becoming more dependent on the internet and the world wide web for the majority of their transactions and other activities for socialization and the like, the internet has become the barometer of every technology created. At first, only computers have the capability to access the web but now, mobile phones and other electronic gadgets were modeled to be compatible with the internet. Technologies will surely be competitive in the market if it provides users access over the web. Because of the overwhelming acceptance and use of the internet, technologies that provides access over the web were such of great demand. Clearly, the birth of the internet is the classic example of “it is the technology that creates the demand”.
Technological change were identified by prominent book authors and experts environmentalists from different parts of the world to be the number 1 contributor to the climate change and global warming. The increasing amount of greenhouse gases is the main reason why the world is experiencing sudden climate change like much stronger typhoons and frequent flash floods due to the increase in the sea level as the results of melting of ice in some cold continents like Antarctica. Technology that human are using is the number one contributor of greenhouse gases specially CO2. Among of these technologies are the fossil fuels, the aerosol sprays, smokes from factories and many more. With human becoming too much dependent on technology which sometimes leads to excessive use of it, this problem of climate change and global warming tend to goes hand in hand with technological change. This will limit on how far can we go with technological change. Although there are efforts initiated by World Organizations and leaders to combat this fatal effects of technological change in our society. Still this problem will not be eradicated unless technology stops changing and reach its final destination.
Technological change had created more jobs for people. More and more factories were created to develop numerous kinds of technology which resulted for jobs specially those who are on the lower class of the society. Because of industrialization, more and more people migrated to cities where the urbanization is at its peak for greener pastures. Although there are also those people who lost their jobs because of the huge improvement in most of human lifestyle like for instance the mailing system. Because of the invention of the electronic mails and short messages sent (SMS) or we commonly known today as text in mobile phones, huge number of employees from post office were fired from their jobs due to decreasing no. of mails. The old-fashioned mailing system had almost become obsolete by the latest communication system. But this disadvantage could not outweigh the no. of jobs created by technological change. In the present, as more and more technologies and services are introduced, it caused shortage in terms of manpower. The skills needed became more and more complex and very high standard in which the academe failed to match. What the academe provides to its students are not what the industry needs. There is what we called “industry-academe mismatch”. This has been the problem of the industry right now where the demand of the experts specially in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is very high. This is one of the major problem in which the government in coordination with the business sector should address first. This scenarios has become worse as more and more companies continue to grow and expand. Clearly, technological change paved a way where opportunities could easily be reached by human, build a strong foundation for human survivability and the most important, it gives human hope that technological change could be the key for their success. Although there are some jobs that become obsolete that caused some to suffer,but this is not enough to cancel the benefits it provides.
