The Fischbowl: Did You Know?

I recently wathed a video called "The Fischbowl: Did You Know?" that was developed by Karl Fisch. It was an extremely interesting and informative video that fills you in on the topic of our society's ever-increasing dependence on technology and how we must make changes to adapt. This country, and even the world, has made huge technological advances in the past years, and it is just going to continue to increase as time passes and technology develops even more. The video gave pretty informative statstics an facts about how the world is changing and how we have begun to adapt to these changes. It stated that computers in the near future will have more computing capabilities than the human brain and fifteen years from now will have more than the human race. It gave many examples of how the world is changing due to technology becoming more and more useful and common. Some examples include the fact that we now have college majors that didnt even exist ten years ago, the number of internet devices increased from 1,000 in 1984, to 600,000,000 in 2006, and that because of the number of myspace users, if myspace was a country it would be the eigth largest in the world. These are staggering facts that help to show just how much our world is becoming more and more dependant on technology.

So, with these facts in mind, one question people may have is how are we adapating to this increase in dependence on technology? Well, many changes have been occuring that will help us to adjust. First of all, the video stated that many students are being trained for jobs that dont even exist yet, in order to solve problems that have not even occured. This means that we are already training people to become informed on problems that could possibly occur years from now. They are also starting to prepare children in schools from an early age to become succesful in the 21st century. This is very necessary in a society that is starting to rely mostly on technology and will continue to more in the future. We need to train young people now so that they will be informed and prepared in the future. Another big step that is occuring is the One Laptop per Child Project (OLPC). This project was created to help students in developing countries, since nearly one in three students in these countries never even complete the fifth grade. The project's goal is to provide these students with laptops that may further their education an even connect them to the outside world. As the video so perfectly showed, we are becoming a world that that is very dependent on technology, but we have already taken steps to prepare for the future. We are aware of the change that is occuring, and we are preparing young students so that they may be informed and well-equipped to handle problems and technological advances that will occur years from now.