>> The Future is Bright. /

"Long Live the Web" by Tim Berners-Lee expresses another side of technology where the web is being threatened in different ways despite it being a powerful and ubiquitous tool. Governments and large corporations have been monitoring people's online habits and selectively showing us different information to create unconscious bias, which effectively endangers our important human rights. Social media corporations collect our data and use algorithms to essentially maximise our attention span to be spent on their platforms, which is an unethical business model without any legal reprecussions. Tim Burners-Lee suggest us to examine legal cultural and technical options that will preserve privacy of our data. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity, so those with power should ensure that the technological protocols and social conventions they set up respect basic human values.

I thought that Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" passage was an illuminating piece to read as it was a historical document that expressed his visions and projections about the future of technology. It was a rumination on he trajectory of new technological systems and the continuous journey to improving methods of storing and consulting mounds of knowledge. Many of this predictions about modern technologies have been fairly accurate, ranging from mediums of photography and advanced forms of Encyclopaedia to calculators and computer integrated devices that can reproduce verbal communication. I believe that most accurate assumption he made was that society would continue the advancement of science and technology. When we reflect on how far inventions and development in technologies have come, we can see that our generation has basically grown up in a digital society where things like phones, the internet, advanced medicine, and vehicles are practically indispensable. Up until now, the pursuit of improving and creating new technologies have been one of society's main priority and may continue to be for a long time.