This week's class is being recheduled to Saturday afternoon as Hari Raya happends to fall on our normal tuesday timeslot. It is a rather long seminar as there were 6 presentations this week to make up the two presentations spillover from last week.
The first presentation by Kirene about High technology and Human Development is quite interesting as the article managed to come up with a technology cycle for technology advancement. The cycle is as follows: Technology advancement èPrepare for peace èGuarantee PeaceèFoster policy of warèRevise technology and the cycle repeats over and over again. The explanation for this cycle is bascially Country A is trying to improve their technology so that they would not face threat and for peace keeping purposes, but then it causes threat to other countries instead as Country A becomes military stronger. The discussion questions were should people carry on with the current technology and destruction? My answer to it would be no, we should not carry on with the building up of military forces, as it will be never ending and all the countries should sign a peace treaty to disarm all their weapons. This will free up alot capital to use to resources to boost the economy of the world and doing something for the environment. If the world is going to end soon, what is the point of being the most powerful country in the world?
Surogacy was another topic being presented and it was interesting as i didn't know that actually human trafficking could exploit surrogacy as a means of income. Surrogacy have both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that fertility problems are being resolved and couples are able to have a baby without adopting one. However, there are also disadvantages to surrogacy as some religion do not accept this method of creating babies as they view pregnancy as sacred. Hence, this may cause a shift in the moral values as the baby would not have a direct connection to their parents in a sense.
The topics being discussed today are Technology and Human Development and Technology and Innovation Management.
Technology and Human Development basically encompass the different ways of human development due to the change in technology. A very good example would be the U.S. consuming natural resources such as oil and fuel at an alarming high rate and has to take resources from third world countries to sustain their growing economy. By doing this, human will develop their economy through the technology of extracting natural minerals and transporting them to the specified location at the expense of our future generation. Even President Obama made the decision of allowing the U.S. corporations to go ahead with their activities to boost their economy at the expense of the environment through pollution and release of other toxic wastes. This calls for sustainability development as human has to find a way to continue their operations without causing harm to the environment which will in turn affect our future generation. Although profits and economic advancement are very important, one should also think of the consequences and impact of their activities and minimize the impact.
The 2 presentations on Technology and Innovation Mangement were interesting but i am more interested in the Masdar City presentation. It is common knowledge that creating a city in the middle of the desert is no easy feat, from the self-sustainable food sources, light, electricity and sanitation services. Masdar City aimed to be the first car-free, zero carbon dioxide emission and zero waste city and i think it was quite amazing as many countries just talked about it but never took action to realize it. If Masdar could make this plan a success, it will definitely be a great advancement of going green in history.
Technology and Innovation Management is basically creating value by increasing the efficiency of Translating Promising Concepts into High Value Products and Services through Research, Development and Application. Although it may take some effort to come up with amazing ideas, it takes more effort to implement the research and put it into place. There are basically 3 types of innovation namely summit, valley and cloud which has different characterics to describe the technology at any point of time. Market-driven innovation is much easier to be done as it requires less fund and can be completed within short term. On the other hand, Technology-driven innovation is much more difficult as it requires huge fundings and a very long time to be created. Hence, technology-driven technology are usually done by the government.
The last 2 presentations were about the 3M's revival and building a skilled clean energy workforce. 3M has been the rising star and dominant player in the past but has become a falling star now. Hence, they are trying to use technology and research to turn into a rising star once again. Building a skilled clean energy workforce is a very innovative idea to me and definitely requires alot of collaborative effort for it to come true.
I think the issues for this topic but has not been discussed in class would be why the United Nations haven't been taking actions to call for greater sustainability development and co-operation from all countries. Moreover, since everybody is talking about sustainable development but yet how many countries and corporations are actually doing it?
I would rate this session a 9/10 as i think i learnt alot from this lesson and it grabs my attention throughout the class.
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