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Borderless Technology: Freedom or Technostress?
| Article
# : |
17460 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1990 |
4,284 Words |
| Author
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Bengt-Arne Vedin
Bengt-Arne Vedin is a professor at the Royal Institute of
Technology in Stockholm, where he specializes in innovation.
He has been guest researcher at the National Academy of
Engineering in Washington, D.C., and at MIT, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and has authored thirty-five books dealing with
such topics as technology, the future, information technology,
industrial policy in Japan, and the service economy. |
You are in an African desert, and suddenly you feel a pain developing in the lower right side of your chest. You know very well that medical doctors are scarce in this sparsely populated area. Your friends in the jeep tell your problems to the chief of the next village you reach. They try to conceal that they are more worried than you are. You are escorted, accompanied by curious children, to the hut of what you suspect is the local medicine man. That he may be, but he is not equipped with a funny hat, a pot over a fire, or a magician's stick. He is asking you questions, and your answers are being fed into what looks like a hand-held calculator. In fact, his questions, too, seem to be read from this black box. After a while, he says something. The interpreter, who has helped during the whole session, transmits a qualified medical judgment, and your treatment is spelled out as well.
The scene above is not science fiction but is based upon development projects well underway and installed as prototypes in, for example, former French colonies in Africa. The hand-held calculator is a dedicated microcomputer, containing so-called expert systems capable of diagnosing a variety of diseases.
The goal of these expert systems is not to render medical doctors superfluous but rather to improve the skill of paramedics in situations where there are no doctors available. The hand-held computer can contain just a limited repertory of illnesses, and only such maladies that may be described rather straightforwardly. The computer will judge on probabilities, but a 70 percent curing rate is better than the 30 percent rate that would have existed without such technology.
Three Dimensions of Information Technology
If you had opened the microcomputer described in the opening scenario, you would have observed that it contains components from fifteen different countries. The medical knowledge it contains has been accumulated by innumerable doctors.
Globalization evokes communications needs. Thus I will begin with a discussion of information and communication technologies, which are both causes and results of the further developments in technology that we experience today.
The hand-held medical computer is one example of the most pervasive technology developments that may be expected in the next decade-information technology. This technology is becoming ever
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