Ubiquitous Technology and The Barrier of Knowledge

Ubiquitous technology has removed the need to remember trivial facts such as the right temperature to cook chicken at or how many feet are in a mile. As a result, the vast majority of individuals delegate the responsibility for this trivial information to their phones or laptops.

The same Kaspersky Labs Study also found that of those who consider their smartphone to be an extension of their brain, two-thirds say that they are able to concentrate on something more important instead.

This information abstraction is good because it allows people to focus on what is more important to them and inevitably provide more undiscovered knowledge to society in the long run.

If everyone were required to memorize and implement every piece of mundane boilerplate knowledge in their respective fields, our progression as a society would be significantly stifled.

Take for example the field of web development. Web development is adapting at breakneck speed with new advances in knowledge every day. This has only been made possible by the tools and information that other web developers have provided on the internet.

The vast majority of web developers today use frameworks such as express for simplified routing or react for effortless UI construction. Without these tools provided by other developers, it would take months for any one person to be able to contribute to the web development space.

In fact, without the off-loading of any knowledge at all, someone who would like to make a web app would have to learn the underlying machine code in order to avoid any abstraction, which would take years.

Clearly this off-loading of knowledge is beneficial to society as a whole because it allows people such as web developers (who don’t necessarily understand the underlying functionality of their tools) to contribute to their field and push our boundary of knowledge further out.

In this instance, it seems as though modern technology is an invaluable stepping stool that allows us to stand on the shoulders of our peers. As we continue to progress along with technology, we may one day look down and see how far we've come.

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