In the past fifteen years we have seen the cell phone (telecommunication) business overtake the personal computer business. The richest man on earth is not Bill Gates anymore, it’s Carlos Slim.
Ideas that can be translated into huge manufacturing processes and huge profits for business have a interesting start. Someone somewhere will eventually notice that if you join that particular technology used in a particular field with that other technology used in a somewhat unrelated field you could have an interesting MARKETABLE product. And at this point this someone will jump out of his tub and shout “Eureka!”.
This means that ideas and technology have to reach a “critical mass” before they fuse (poetic licence) and create a product.
Sometimes, it was easy for people not interested in the discovery and marketing of a particular product to stop it from reaching the mass manufacturing stage, especially if it involved huge sums for research and development. Solar energy, wind energy, energy produced by waves are cases in point. But if the product is small enough, if it can be manufactured on a massive scale fast enough, if it can show profit almost immediately, then there is no stopping this new product. There are too many manufacturing centers waiting to invest in something, and greed and profit sometimes help humanity in making life better. The people mentioned above will be left trying to control this new technology in the areas they feel it will hurt them, create countermeasures, and/or try to discredit the product.
The contention of this intervention is that a “critical mass” has been reached for such a new product. Let us review some of the existing
technologies:
Fact: The cell phone is here to stay. It is so widespread that the cleaning lady and the garbage collector for our neighborhood each have one, and if you knew how poor is our country, you would grasp the true meaning of widespread.
Fact: Facial recognition software have gained so much ground that they are actively used in all major airports of the world (according to the thrillers we have all been watching on TV.)
Fact: Recognizing a lie from facial expressions and/or intonations of the voice are nearly as reliable as weather forecasts, for instance. (or so we are told by esteemed behavioral scientists)
SO HOW LONG WILL IT BE BEFORE SOMEONE REALIZES THAT HE CAN PRODUCE A MARKETABLE LIE DETECTOR AND ATTACH IT TO A CELL PHONE?
Greed and Deception, two of the titans of the business world, slugging it out. Who do you think will win? My money is on greed.
Readers with active imagination, when they reach this point, will likely turn off all sources of noise in the room, in the hope of catching those
“EUREKA!”. Maybe the research and development on this product has already begun; and maybe millions of dollars are being spent as we read to devise discrediting plans or to fund research for countermeasures.
Imagine, if you will, that people had had such a device attached to their television sets when a certain person denied knowledge of Watergate, or when Larry King asked another person how well he knew that other person. How many parliamentarians would have been elected if asked the right questions?
One can only gawk at the social and economic repercussions of such a product if it came into existence.
Interesting times we are living, don’t you think?
