by Bob Lloyd

Created on: February 14, 2010

Ever since human beings started to transform their environment and make use of it, technology has been with us, enabling us to improve our control over nature, use its resources, and increase our productive forces.  By changing our environment through the use of technology, we have developed practical and learning skills which enabled us to improve on the previous methods.

From the invention of fire, through to the wheel, the well, the plough and the supercomputer, we have been using technology in all aspects of our lives scarcely being aware of how widespread it is.  Once our food, our clothes, and our shelter were secured by readily available technology, we could use the surplus we'd produced to expand our production, our knowledge, and our skills.

From the industrial smokestacks of 150 years ago, our technology has been growing at an exponential rate.  Ray Kurzweil estimates that compared with current rates of the growth of knowledge, by the end of the century it will be at least two hundred times faster.

Even a brief look at the last thirty years will give some idea of the increasing pace of change.  Since the early eighties, we have PCs and laptops, mobile phones, the web, digital communications, satellites, organ transplants, genetic engineering, the human genome decoded, machine learning, robotics, medical scanning, prosthetics including retinas and artificial hearing, nanotechnology and materials science, and countless more.

Technical and scientific discoveries and new processes are found every day and this has a profound effect on our society.  Whereas fifty years ago, children delighted in science fiction stories about fantastic technologies, now they expect the news to inform them that they have been developed.

Our food is changing with mass production and genetically-modified plants, as is the process of growth and harvesting.  Our houses are now made of very different materials from even fifty years ago, constructed using modern techniques from computer-generated designs by architects skilled in using sophisticated software.

Technology applied to the production process enables in turn greater application of improving technologies.  The monitoring and control of production increases production levels leading to a surplus that pushes trade and expansion, in turn matched by the increased speed and flexibility of commercial transactions around the world.

The new materials sciences enable the production of greater ranges

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