A World About To Be Born

A quarter of all the people now living, about two billion, are above fifty and have the perpetual job of coping with a world in close embrace with the internet.

- (The writer is a US-based international development advisor and had worked with the World Bank. He can be reached at [e-mail])

A quarter of all the people now living, about two billion, are above fifty and have the perpetual job of coping with a world in close embrace with the internet. You cannot travel unless you know how to buy a ticket or reserve a hotel on some website. You cannot talk to your son or daughter in another city unless you are familiar with Zoom, Meet, Skype or WhatsApp. You cannot eat what you enjoy unless your fingers are adept at ordering from Grubhub, Doordash and Uber Eats. Even if you walk to a restaurant, you cannot read the menu—there is often none—unless you have learned how to use your smartphone to read the QR code that shrouds the menu.

If you think the world has become too complicated, I have bad news for you. It is about to get far more complicated. You have to deal with the radical change that is coming.

Like things that kill, guns, and things that save life, medicines, computers have evolved quite a bit. In the fifties to seventies, a small number of us coped with huge computers called mainframes. In the next thirty years, small versions, desktops and laptops, simply conquered the world. Then came the internet: computers started getting interlinked; words, pictures and songs began to flow from one person to another all over the globe. Now we are seeing the sway of the next stage: mobile and cloud computing. The data can be anywhere, accessible by anybody with any device from anywhere.