Democratization of technology
In the past, only big businesses and government facilities had access to powerful computers and tools. Today, people have phones with the same power those original computers had and more. Evidence of democratization can be seen in every technology-based process today. It’s happening as much in open source software as it is in life sciences as it is in access to the internet. It is ubiquitous. And more than that, it’s two-edged in its impact. Just as fire can be used to heat homes as well as burn them down, these technological tools can be used for good and bad; the main difference in these contemporary tools is their scalability. Fires can’t be set simultaneously across millions of homes, but social engineering can influence tens of millions of voters through social media platforms at the press of a button. The aggregators and merchants of democratized technologies must therefore exercise a level of social responsibility that was previously unnecessary overkill: It’s critical to the survival of not just the industry, but to all of civil society. Before too long, it will be critical to all of humanity.
Thomas Friedman argued that the era of globalisation has been characterised by the democratization of technology, democratization of information and democratization of finance. Technology has been critical in the latter two processes, facilitating the rapid expansion of access to specialised knowledge and tools as well as changing the way that people view and demand such access. Scholars and social critics often side the invention of the printing press as a major invention that changed the course of mankind. In the mid 15th century, a German blacksmith named Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg — fortunately also known as simply Johannes Gutenberg — revolutionized printing technology with the introduction of the mechanical movable type.
The invention of the printing press didn’t simply disrupt the reproduction of texts: It also massively shaped the course of human history. The process of mass-producing books gave birth to the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, modern vernacular languages, and the Scientific Revolution, which ultimately led us to the creation of Mars Rovers, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet. The printing revolution transformed our world by democratizing access to knowledge.
But that’s just one aspect of the story.
A book is only useful if people can read. A book is a simple instrument, and educating people on how to read one is just as important as providing them with easy access to libraries. Simply put, the value of a book is connected to its fruition. The mass-production of books initiated meaningful changes due to the development of institutions for education and literacy that spawned from the cathedral schools that were founded in the Early Middle Ages and spread throughout the 15th and 16th centuries during the scholastic movement.
Microsoft bolstered the democratization of personal computers through the introduction of MS-DOS, a far less scary version of UNIX. Then Xerox soon introduced a graphical user interface (GUI) to its operating system, which was even more appealing thanks to its intuitive frontend based on icons, windows, sliders, and scroll bars.
Ultimately, this led us to more familiar environments such as Windows and MacOS. The rest, as they say, is history. Without Microsoft, Intel, and Apple, there would be no digital transformation. The development of microcomputers in combination with intuitive user interfaces allowed computers to infiltrate every aspect of our lives. Add mobility to the mix (with the rise of the iPhone and all the mobile devices that followed) — together with the Internet of Things — and it’s easy to understand how we ended up in this magical era in which everything is controlled through sophisticated software, from homes, to fridges, cars, processes, public institutions, commerce, trade, banking, and everything you do at work.
You don’t have to be a tech wizard to run an analysis on public data because the tools to do so are in apps or toolkits that are easily customizable by the average Joe. There are increasingly more products that encourage users to give feedback to improve functionality and affordability.