Cedric Harold, Contributor
THERE ARE two properties that characterise the Information Age. The first is a dependence on information technology to get things done. The second is that knowledge workers outnumber industrial and agricultural workers.
AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION
It is not surprising that the first technological revolution was called the Agricultural Revolution. People learned to breed animals and plants; learned to harness oxen, horses and other animals to machines like the plough or the grinding wheel; and developed a greater understanding of how to improve the fertility of soils through manure and periods of fallow.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
When we think of the Industrial Revolution, we tend to think of factories - perhaps of chimneys belching out smoke and other pollutants - and of the things produced within them. The explanation for this is that the Industrial Revolution took aim at the farm and invented new farm equipment (harvesters, threshing machines, agro-processing machines) and new animal and plant varieties.
We often lose sight of this single fact when we think of the United States of America and Europe as industrial nations, focusing on their high technology outputs and forgetting that they are the world's major producers of many basic agricultural commodities - rice, wheat, maize, cotton, soya, milk, beef, etc.
One of the outputs of the Industrial Revolution was the computer. The first machines were developed in the 1940s, and were largely experimental. Research, particularly in England and the U.S.A., continued after the war (WW2), resulting in the development of some room-filling machines with thousands of valves marketed.
The real breakthrough came with the invention of the transistor in 1947. Its inventors - Brattain, Shockley and Bardeen - were duly rewarded with the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956.
The transistor and its continued miniaturisation led to smaller and smaller computers. Interestingly, small size did not mean less power, and some pocket computers have more computing capability than the giants that filled rooms in the 1950s and 1960s.
Computers, telecommunica-tions, networks of computers, distributed databases and complex software have given computers a life of their own, which is now recognised as characterising the Information Age. Whereas agricultural and industrial workers acquired and worked on things to produce other things, knowledge workers handle data and generate information.
The signal achievements of the Information Age include:
Sequencing the human DNA.
Space exploration.
Robotics and artificial intelligence.
The Internet.
E-commerce and Electronic banking.
Electronic search engines (e.g., Google).
Smart bombs and cruise missiles.
Genetically modified foods.
