Where Is Technology Heading and What’s the Next Step in Its Advancement

by Waqar Hassan Blogger, Author and Entrepreneur

You hear a lot about technology today. Technology is everywhere, technology can do this and that, the future belongs to technology and what not. However, an ordinary person sitting at home has a very vague idea of where the technology is heading. One thing you can be sure about is that technological revolutions have not come to a halt. Just like the invention of computers, internet, and smartphones, new innovations in technology will change the way the world goes around. There are is a basic concept that you have to understand to know where technology is heading.

The Future Belongs to Smarter Computers

It was quite an astonishing achievement for the humankind that it was able to make machines memorize things. In the past, machines were only manual and could not take orders. In the 20^th century, things changed completely when the first computer was built. It was now practically possible to not only give machines commands but have them memorize them for execution later. The communication technology continued to get better and today, you can send a message across seven oceans within a second. Throughout this time, the main focus of technological progress was making computers faster.

Today, the aim has shifted to a more revolutionary idea. Scientists and engineers now want computers to learn things on their own. Take the example of a human child. After a child has been given birth, it is the parents who have to take care of the child’s needs. There comes a time when the child is able to stand on his/her feet, walk, run, and do all sorts of things. However, you have to let the child on his//her own when they are 18 years of age. You can say that the technology has reached that age. Humans want computers to learn things on their own.

That’s where machine learning comes in. Rather than feeding every piece of data manually, scientists now want machines to “experience” the data and learn from it. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence. The idea is to make the machines intelligent enough to learn things on their own, and then take decisions based on their learning. The advancement of this idea is what has given birth to IoT i.e. internet of things. For machines to learn, communicate, and take actions, human involvement should not be compulsory anymore. This reduces the laborious work for programmers and makes the world more convenience for humans in many ways.

Final Thoughts

Once you know the basic idea of what machine learning is all about, the next big question is, “how do these machines learn everything on their own?” It is best that you view this detailed guide to machine learning to know all about the basics of the concepts, how it works, and what different methods are used for machine learning. A perfect example of machine learning in progress is the development of driverless cars. The software is supposed to learn things on its own so it can improve in accuracy and precision with time without human involvement. How the world will look once there are learned machines everywhere is something you will have to see when the right time comes.