Lesson 2

Today's lesson was about technology, society and human development, and in my opinion, was more intriguing than I expected! Prof started with a video titled 'History of the World' which showed the formation of our planet and the evolution of human beings. To quicken things up, 1 second in the video represented 50 years in the universe. It showed how tribesmen in the past began living as a population by creating their own language, using metal as tools, hunting animals for food and then to more civilized activities like domestication of animals, farming for food and creating written languages. I was always interested in how languages came about, I mean, who sat down one day to decide how the alphabet looks like when written, how it is pronounced, and the formation of the enormous number of words in our dictionary today? Though the video did not answer my question, it did show roughly when people started to have a language that they could communicate in and what did the first "version" of written language looked like.

We also saw how different regions of the world possessed varying portions of the world's economy since 1AD to 2050AD. I feel that it is interesting how with advancing technology and rapid development, some regions gain a bigger share of the economy over the years while others' economy just fall downhill.

Today's lesson also touched on global dominance, and to illustrate this, Prof showed a video about Britain wanting to dominate the world in the past. Britain, apparently, had connections everywhere at a point of time. She took over America, Asia, India, and several other regions but ended up broke. Expansion clearly failed and the colonel countries slowly rebelled and gain independence after World War 2. I enjoyed this video particularly when they showed how everything that's supposedly British actually originated elsewhere, like tea, sugar, and even the name 'Victoria'.

We also learned about the rising star and falling star mindsets which I thought was very applicable and evident in the society today. Countries like China, India, and regions like Asia adopted the rising star mindset - humble, open, optimistic and willing to take risks. As a result, they are enjoying rapid development today and are gaining economic prosperity. On the other hand, the giants like USA and UK adopted the falling star mindsets and were not keen for new ideas, unwilling to learn from the smaller nations and underestimated them.

During the open discussion, we talked about the article "Innovation in the Reset World" where it mentioned 3 things that showed why innovation is needed to succeed in today's world:

Box 1: Managing the present
Box 2: Selectively forgetting about the past
Box 3: Creating the future

In my opinion, there 3 boxes very aptly describe what are the basic things one needs to understand in order to succeed. To create an ideal future, it is best to selectively forget about the past's bad experiences, and managing the present well. It is rather self-explanatory but very applicable.

I would like to end this post with a question - What is the relationship between world change and development? Which is the cause and which is the effect, or are they a result of one another? To me, I believe they are mutually linked like how a circle has no beginning, they lead to each other and it's a never-ending cycle.