What are your favourite examples of the pinnacle of human engineering:
- The aluminium drink can?
- A Saturn V rocket?
- Sophisticated programming code running on a microprocessor?
All three are examples of engineering beauty demonstrating complexity and sequences of many individual events that together formed the basis of the end product. Referring to technology in these cases is very apt, but the term is heavily diluted.
This post is to make a case for using the term technology smarter and better. It is often used as a place-filler with little or no precision. Wikipedia starts by listing the wide application of the word: “making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization”. Which is the problem for the intention of using the term technology in a precise manner. Ie. it means many different things.
It is much better to refer to a specific technique as just that, a technique, than throw the whole technology label at it. Also, just because something is connected to computing/IT does not make it cutting edge technology. Eradicating bad software bugs that should not have been there in the first place is hardly an event in the historical annals of technology.
In computing the semiconductor or the application of lithography were however technological events. Or giant magnetoresistance in hard disk drive development. And so on, there are plenty of spectacular examples where technology is an apt term highlighting engineering leapfrogs. Let us use the label ‘technology’ only when it is warranted.
