Humans and Technology Must Win Together, Too

In this next article on the topic of “Win Together,” let’s explore the fact that, if we are to continue to succeed in the future, humans, and technology must win together, too.

Racing Progress of Technology

In my opinion, the first real challenge of the future is that technology is developing almost faster than we can keep up. Just look over the last 50 years and the fact that computer chips continue to decrease significantly in size but greatly increase in capacity. But we must keep technology advancing because technology is one of the vital components to solving today’s global issues.

One fact is clear—that a major contribution to technological progress is open source. Open source has made continuous cooperation and collaboration possible on a broad scale. Millions of programmers worldwide are working on solving similar or the same issues, making technological advancement that much more rapid.

Such sharing of knowledge was not always possible. Can you imagine what it would have been like if Leonardo Da Vinci’s amazing innovations could have been shared with the entire world during his lifetime? Today we have similar geniuses, and this kind of sharing is enabled.

Collaboration and Advancement

The great thing about today’s networked society is that brilliant people can surround themselves with others of the same level of ability. It’s not simply adding on people—it creates an exponential level of innovation. That collaborative innovation can occur all over the globe, independent of time, locality, race, gender, and even language.

This kind of collaboration results in unprecedented advancement of technology. As an example, just driving a car amazes me in the last few years. I remember my first car when I was a teenager, and in comparison, I feel like I’m piloting a spaceship. It’s just a matter of time until we have self-driving cars.

As humans, we tend to mentally compare the growth of technology to the development of humans. Humans pass through phases in growth—infancy, childhood, puberty, young adulthood, adulthood, middle age, and elderly. We cannot judge technology the same way. Whereas a human child cannot go to sleep one night and wake up an adult, technology could indeed make such a jump. Because of the sheer amount of programming talent being directed at it, technology that’s immature one month could be spectacularly mature the next month.

Use of Technology

There was a time when humans would put off the use of technology, despite its availability. “Why should I use that? I can do it better myself!”

Those days, fortunately, or unfortunately, are over. Especially in business, there is little to nothing we can do without technology. Data entry, data aggregation, data analysis, data enrichment, product tracking from manufacturing to delivery to customer—all of these and many other functions are impossible without technology.

Covid would have been more of a disaster than it was without technology. It wasn’t just the fact we were able to use videoconferencing tools such as Webex, GoToMeeting and Zoom, but the existence of smartphones and other innovations also got us through.

From the issues that affected us through the pandemic, we’ll continue to see solutions. For example, the son of a good friend of mine has developed an automated solution for remote tutoring (you can see it at gostudent.org). There will be many more to come.

Technology proliferation will only increase over time. I predict that by the year 2030, innovations and advancements will be growing so fast we won’t be able to comprehend them. It will be like a constant roller-coaster ride.

Technology Merges With Humans

Technology, as it advances, is undoubtedly changing our approach to ourselves as humans. It became possible for a legless man to compete as a runner in the Olympics. There has existed for some years now a pacemaker for the heart. Replacement of many other limbs and organs is undoubtedly in our future.

How far can this go? I really don’t think there is a limit—and I fear this could be a problem and could cross ethical boundaries. For example, should we have chips implanted into our brains? Several projects are moving forward in this area right now, one being led by Elon Musk.

Keeping the Balance

We do need to maintain the balance between humans and technology, and not let technology overtake us. Machines outpace humans in the fact of not being lazy, inefficient, lacking endurance, requiring sleep, and not possessing many other shortcomings. A person might think that, when all is said and done, a robot might be able to do something better.

But remember this: one factor that makes humans utterly unique compared to computers is that humans can innovate and create, where machines cannot. This includes the creation of machines themselves.

For Pipeliner CRM

What does all this mean for Pipeliner CRM?

As I mentioned earlier, one significant factor for us is that the entire Pipeliner stack is built on open-source technology. That means we don’t just have single programmers developing and upgrading Pipeliner components—we have millions. Because of this, we have constant access to innovations as they are made. Our technology will never be outdated.

As an example, Pipeliner is hosted in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is just the host, though, and a developer such as Pipeliner is free to choose the operating system on which they will run. We could utilize a proprietary OS such as Windows, Red Hat Linux, or another Unix variant, but we decided to use an open-source OS called ubuntu. Additionally, we make use of AngularJS JaveScript, Python programming language, and many others.

In participating in the open-source community, we’re constantly oriented to the future. In partnership with technology, we’re genuinely winning together.

For our human users, it means that we are constantly placing a better system in their hands. It’s a true benefit to having a solution that is incrementally improved daily. Doing so leads to efficiency. Efficiency leads to productivity, and productivity leads to profitability. Profitability leads to security for a company, its employees, and its communities.

What is next? I think that in the not-too-distant future, we’ll be able to issue voice commands to applications and have them perform for us. I believe we’ll see tremendous advancements in computer intelligence. Innovations in algorithms will mean that a system will provide advice to humans to help them think and plan more effectively. This doesn’t mean computers replace humans, but that systems offer options, such as a best-case scenario, a worst-case, and perhaps the best approach that should be taken.

CRM is one of the core applications for any business enterprise or organization. Therefore a CRM such as ours being constantly improved makes for a total “win together” for humans and technology.