Technology Heals and Transports

If you think about it, the first uses for new products are not always the ones that become most useful. Satellites led to the GPS; nuclear bombs led to nuclear materials for treating cancer. Almonds and crickets are now made into flour. So, who knows what AI, 3D printing, drones, robots, and sensors will be best known for in the future.

The Trendwatching site introduced me to the way a Pepsi ad used phones to help sets of three people get together during Ramadan in Egypt. Three people had to hold their phones next to each other side by side to view a full Pepsi ad that told them to put away their phones and pay attention to each other. That's the way to overcome the loneliness that undermines health.

Virtual reality glasses provided health and welfare benefits in Brazil's nursing homes. Intel partnered with "Reasons to Believe" to give VR glasses to seniors who always longed to travel to the countries of their ancestors. With the glasses, they could experience these trips. Working with Burson-Marsteller, Intel's public relations agency, a project called "Technology and Life" also will show VR's importance in treating autism and patients with visual and motor disabilities.

You can start listing other VR uses, some already being tried, to show customers in one country items they could buy in another, to help a shut-in or hospitalized child go to the zoo or a ball game, to show a friend a 3-D version of your African safari.... Look through a travel magazine and you'll see Alaska, Iceland, Ireland, Paris, Rome, Prague, Rio, Cape Town, and so many other places you'd love to visit with the help of VR glasses or a VR headset..

The Importance of Studying Literature in a Scientific Age

Just after I began reading Siddhartha Mukherjee's engaging and informative book, The Gene, I saw Julia, a new Muppet with autism, joined the characters on Sesame Street. Did a gene cause Julia's deviation from "normalcy" and could she be "fixed" by manipulating her genes? Quickly I realized my line of thinking was the dangerous conclusion Mukherjee warns us all to seriously consider.

     Taken together, the 21,000 to 23,000 genes that live in cells on a human's 46 chromosomes carry a set of genetic instructions that cause proteins to build, repair, and maintain our bodies. Once the particular function of a gene or set of genes is identified, genetic technologies can change a function and produce copies. Voila, genetically modified seeds, food, animals, and humans.

     Like a physicist working with atoms can develop a bomb or a hacker can use code to create fake news, a geneticist can manipulate genes to alter humans permanently. These masters will be able to control our bodies, to make what they consider perfect or imperfect humans. What do they do, when they find an unborn child has Down's syndrome or cystic fibrosis? Who will defend the innocent from the guilty and the guilty from the innocent? And who will define "innocent" and "guilty?"

     Science marches on taking us into an age of robots, artificial intelligence (AI), clones, drones, virtual reality, driverless cars, and more. Looking at the horse's name, "Cloud Computing," of the winner of the Preakness, the second race in the Triple Crown after the Kentucky Derby, you see how technology is reaching into all fields. Could Kellyanne Conway have described the Internet of Things (IoT) in a way that didn't suggest microwave ovens spy on us? Yes, but the ridicule that greeted Rachel Carson's expose of DDT in Silent Spring and the skepticism about the miracles at Fatima did not make the messages they delivered any less real.

     The University of Wisconsin-Madison described Matthew Aliota, one of its "Forward under 40" honorees, as "an expert on tropical mosquito-borne diseases" who believes "scientific communication is an important responsibility." To his way of thinking, research findings that are shared quickly with the public can improve public health. Mukherjee would add that shared research findings also would enable the public to understand and react to potential problems caused by these findings. Laughter, ridicule, and skepticism are hardly the right responses to important breakthroughs.

     Throughout the world, the public depends on communicators (authors, journalists, editors, film and TV directors, advertising copywriters, playwrights, social media content developers, artists, and the like)  to read about and understand the potential and problems of each new technology and to know how to provide an engaging presentation that informs us of our choices.