The language, the wheel, the gunpowder, the plow, the printing press machine, electricity, telephony, penicillin. Historians do not agree. What was the most important invention? Which was the most transformative?
If we evaluated for its usefulness, the truth is that no other creation had as much impact on the quality of life as the steam engine. By substituting the use of human and animal energy, and multiplying the strength of the muscle to infinity, the invention of the steam engine substantially changed the historical line of humanity.
We are living today another radical leap in the history of man: the steam engine of our era is the revolution of information technology and communications. Just as machines boosted the strength of our muscles, computers and the internet are expanding the capacity of our brain up to an unsuspected limits, as stated by MIT professors Brynjolfsson and McAfee in “The Second Machine Age.”
It is expected that in the next five years the number of internet connections will triple, and that the next decade will add some 7,000 million people connected. This phenomenon is changing all aspects of society’s, creating new working methods and new jobs, new business models, new relationships in society and new forms of social expression.
As with the Industrial Revolution, progress in the “age of knowledge” brought and will bring new problems and immense challenges.
If we went back to the year 2000 and tried to predict what would happen in economic, cultural and technological terms in the next fifteen years, it would be almost impossible to predict the multiple developments that took place.
Who would have imagined then the enormous development of social networks, when Facebook or Twitter did not exist? How many believed that Korea would be the great technological power that it is and that China would step on the heels of the United States as the first economy in the world? Who could have suspected that the human genome would be mapped? How to guess that we would arrive in 2015 with more cell phones than people in the world?
