Forecasting and Prediction in an Innovation Context

 

CS875 Unit 3-2

Forecasting and Prediction in an Innovation Context

For centuries, human beings have been forecasting and predicting about what the future may unfold or about products that might exist in the future. Some of the predictions have come into reality, some have failed while others might unfold in the near future. There exists quite a number of physicists, engineers, researchers, and futurists who made noble predictions that have significantly contributed to the evolution and development of some of the products, tools, and technologies being used in the 21st century. Nikola Tesla is among the most renowned and popular inventors whom some of his predictions have turned to reality. According to McSweeney(2019), Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American electrical engineer who was born in 1856. Besides inventing the alternating current, Tesla made powerful predictions that have been the foundation of the innovative technologies that are in use in the 21st century. Undoubtedly, some the current existing technologies and particularly the Internet can be traced back to his predictions and future projections.

Primarily, this discussion will focus on Tesla’s prediction about the evolution of the Internet and the smartphone. As quoted by Kottke (2018), Tesla predicted that “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” While it was just a prediction, his vision was clearly describing the current current interconnected world characterized by high-speed Internet connectivity with billions of connected computers, smartphone, and Internet-of-Things devices. The “huge brain” can be related to the Internet which enables the global community to seamlessly communicate and exchange information regardless of the physical location. With an Internet-enabled smartphone, a person can be able to attend a video conference, exchange documents, listen to music, make a call or even watch videos.

As shown in the figure below, the evolution and the growth of the Internet can be attributed to advanced technological developments that followed after the invention of the computers. Since the invention of a computer with a graphical user interface, the need to share information led to technological developments which significantly led to the evolution of the ARPANET in 1969 and which is considered the first packet-switched network (Navarria, 2016). Technological advancements did not stop at this stage but further developments made Tim Berners-Lee to propose the development of the hypertext protocol in 1989 to enable computers to share data (Kujur & Chhetri, 2015). Since then, this development has led to the rapid growth and wide-adoption of the World Wide Web. 


Figure 1: Evolution of Modern Technology (marthalainez27, n.d.).




Reference List

Kottke, J. (2018, April). Nikola Tesla Predicted the Smartphone in 1926. Retrieved December 30, 2021, from https://kottke.org/18/04/nikola-tesla-predicted-the-smartphone-in-1926

Kujur, P., & Chhetri, B. (2015). Evolution of world wide web: Journey from web 1.0 to web 4.0. International Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 6(1), 134-138.

marthalainez27. (n.d.). Information Technology Timeline. Retrieved December 30, 2021, from https://edu.glogster.com/glog/information-technology-timeline/25nft1enrks?=glogpedia-source

McSweeney, K. (2019, July). 4 of Nikola Tesla’s Predictions That Came True. Retrieved December 30, 2021, from https://now.northropgrumman.com/4-of-nikola-teslas-predictions-that-came-true/

Navarria, G. (2016, November). How the Internet was born: from the ARPANET to the Internet. Retrieved December 30, 2021, from https://theconversation.com/how-the-internet-was-born-from-the-arpanet-to-the-internet-68072

 


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