Last Friday, I went to work by
booking a private bike ride. I pinned my pick-up location and tracked down its
departure with my phone. Arrived early in the office, I searched for a
smartphone for my father. These past 3 days, an e-commerce community held an
online shopping party. They put nation-wide advertisements all over places,
including national television. Then I
opened my email which had already linked to several websites and applications.
I read through several social media outlets to find new articles from various
writers and influencers. A message came from my friend in London, we were
discussing about everything while catching up with the time difference. Good
thing was she had insomnia. In the afternoon, I went home by a ride-sharing
service. This time, I got a property marketer. So I reached home with various
stories about gemstones and property business from the today’s driver. That was
an interesting Friday.
This story is not unique. It is
happening to everyone with good access to information who is able to make use
of the advancement of digital movement. The rapid development in this sector
encounters my curiosity. I even grouped with some of my friends to discuss and
get deeper insight to this particular phenomenon. A lot of publications have
been examining these trends. One of the most interesting concept is the one
that is proposed by Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from the MIT Lab.
In their book, The Second Machine
Age, they observe various aspects around digital revolution. So is it anything
special about the digital period? It is observed that the prior jump in human
history on technology was the industrial revolution. It is commenced by the
invention of steam engine by James Watt and his colleagues in 1775. The
industrial revolution was the first time that human progress was driven
primarily by technological innovation. Thus we called it the first machine age
which overcome the limitations of muscle power, human, and animal.
What we have experienced today, written
in the first introduction story, is the second machine age. This period
highlights the role of computer and other digital advances over mental power.
Mental power is important for progress and development, thus sharp increase in
it will be the great improvement in humanity. Every technology takes time to
refine itself to be able to power a technological revolution. It happened to
steam engine in industrial revolution so will the digital engines. Digital
phenomenon that we have seen today is the entrance of a second machine age, the
inflection point. It is a point where the curve starts to bend a lot.
The technological progress in
this era has three key characteristics, which are exponential, digital, and
combinatorial.
· The advancement of technology today is a result
of steady exponential improvement that prior situation is no longer a reliable
guide to what will happen afterward.
· Digitisation creates understanding. Goods made
of bits can be replicated perfectly and sent across any places instantly. Digitisation
makes huge amount of data readily accessible which enables more people to
formulate theories and hypotheses then evaluating them.
·Digital innovation is recombinant innovation
where each development becomes a building block for next innovation. It extends
to physical type of technologies, including autonomous cars, drone camera, and
countless varieties of innovations. Digital technologies are indeed a GPT (general
purpose technologies), deep new ideas or techniques that have the potential for
important impacts on many sectors of the economy[1].
Nonetheless, it has its limit. An economist, Martin Weitzman, developed a model
of new growth theory which stated that growth is constrained by number of
potential new ideas in the early stages of development, but in the future it is
inhibited only by the ability to process them.
This writing serves as a brief introduction
to the term of digital revolution which is resumed from the two aforementioned experts.
The two stated in their book that the second machine age will be characterized
by countless instances of machine intelligence and billions of interconnected
brains working together to better understand and improve our world.
In the next writing, I will
discuss more about how this digital phenomenon impacts applies in Indonesia
context.
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