Technology: how it has become an integral part of our day to day life?

21st century, an era of modern science and technology, a brave new world, which has changed our lives entirely making our day to day routine much easier and convenient.

Ages ago a very famous poet and playwright of English literature, William Shakespeare quoted in ‘The Tempest’

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people init

These are the words used by the character of Miranda who has never seen humans other than her father and their Monster slave. These words express the feeling of Miranda after her encounter with other humans. The joy of seeing the new world full of people and possibilities.

They are not merely a quote of a fictional character but would appear to any human who has seen a primitive world and now experiencing a new upgraded technology in day to day life.

This world, a brave new world of ours is a place where we use smartphones and wireless computers to simplify our daily tasks. Be it simply mathematical calculation or having an opportunity to talk to our near and dear ones through a video call, getting the latest news on an instance of pressing few keys or paying bills on some tap of our smartphones. Now instead of standing for long tedious hours to pay bills or withdrawing/depositing money from a bank, we are able to do it with just a few taps. Not just that we are able to visit the entire world or know it with those little taps of our hand-sized phone.

Examples of new world technology-shared above seem to be an easy-to-go technology to us, but it has an entire set of complex modern technologies to build these easy to go apps for our everyday usage. Advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Cloud computing and many more plays a vital role in building such love-to-tap-and-get-done-kinda apps for us.

Now the question arises what are these technologies and how they are related to our life?

Introduction

While being in a conversation with people of non-technical backgrounds especially when I start discussing my work or initiate a conversation on technologies like Artificial intelligence or Machine learning etc, people start mocking by asking questions like do you work with NASA or ISRO? Those very questions lead me to the thought that how much we are unaware of the fact that our everyday tasks are conveniently associated with these technologies and yet we have no idea what they are and how they touch our lives?

For instance, when we talk about what Artificial intelligence is, we should know that it is a computer system build to mimic Human intelligence. Similarly, there is machine learning which is the field of study that gives computers the capability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Another technology would be Cloud computing which we use every day and are yet unaware of it. Cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer. There is a lot more technologies which we get in touch with every day and yet feel untouched to them. Now, how we can relate it to our daily lives?

Examples of Technology Every day

We use this technology of AI when we use our smart apps to book our cabs from Uber or Lyft apps. Yes, you heard me right, now you would ask how AI plays a role in such a simple app of finding a cab.  AI have you thought how it estimates the cost of the distance you travel, or how it finds the nearest cab driver or pool you with the same route traveler as yours. These estimations are made through the technology of AI.

AI is also used in one of the most prominent tasks of every young or old mindset get indulged in. of course, I am talking about social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, snap chat and twitter. Again the facial recognition on the app while uploading pictures, contextual emojis, facial filters, identification of objects all this is AI.

We all love online shopping, right? How easy life has become since online shopping. No walking from shop to shop to do the daily errands, no piling of attires to find one that you like, easy cost comparison saves time, effort, fuel and energy in just a few taps. Well, when you buy how easily your online shopping apps present you to the products related to your purchase. Or someone else’s purchase on the same product of your liking. This is done by an artificial neural network to generate these recommendations.

Voice to text or smart personal assistants like google assistant or Siri is also AI-powered as they are able to do tasks like set reminders, internet searches, etc.

Most tedious work use to be when you had to stand long hours in a bank queue just to deposit your cheque. But now these bank apps as the feature of cheque deposits through your smartphone app. This is a combination of AI and machine learning.

These were someday to day usage of AI and machine learning which were definitely not NASA or ISRO related. Now let’s move to another upgraded technology of the world and that would be Cloud computing technology.

Again, I am going to talk about social media which has become the most important part of our everyday. Whatsapp that we use has cloud storage for messages and multimedia. We, in fact, share a lot of information on our social media websites which is again stored on the clouds. The biggest example of cloud usage would be our smartphones cloud; nowadays every smartphone has its own cloud for data storage where we store our pictures, documents, and other data. The companies that we work in also use clouds on a huge level to securely store their data and use as per their requirement.

These are a few interrelations of these technologies into our everyday routine that we encounter every now and then. We might not think how these apps we use for our daily task work or how they are managed but little thought on the same could enhance your horizon of knowledge. People with the least of the technical knowledge are using these complex technologies with fluency and mere few taps on the screen of your phone. Technology that we find complex and high profile is being used in the easiest way possible by even those who might have not even got a chance to go to schools. These technologies have simplified our lives and made all tenacious tasks easy and fun-loving.