Nerdy or Informed

For anyone who has known me for a while you would remember that I had a Google GLASS. Now I wrote a few blogs about it, posted and engaged about it on LinkedIn. It was the new shiny toy for us “nerds” or one might say “visionaries”. If you don’t know what Google GLASS was or is (yes, it’s still around) it was a pair of glasses that you wore with no frames or lenses that had a little screen on the left corner of your eye that was sort of a heads-up display. They eventually came out with options?for frames to let you look less dorky, more socially acceptable, and for people who needed glasses to wear them. I had so many people make comments to me on how nerdy I was or looked, but I didn’t care. See, Google GLASS was the first time, that I bought into the “new shiny thing”, and it taught me a lot. There was actually a lot of controversy behind the product, but I digress.

?I have not always been this into tech, and as a matter of fact, I had no desire to be informed about it. All, I wanted to do when I became a nurse was to take care of patients, and that is what I was going to do for the rest of my life. Life doesn’t always go the way you want, and I landed in Clinical Informatics kicking and screaming, but that has turned out well for me. I eventually realized that I could have a much bigger impact on society as a whole by implementing technology that could truly put an indelible dent in healthcare, which would help more people than I ever could at the bedside. Google GLASS was the turning point though on how I look at technology, and when I started to really think about the product I wrote a blog on how I didn’t think it would make it…yet. As we live in the current world that we live in I have come to the realization that I am not nerdy, but rather I am informed about technology, and if you are not you should be. When I went to Google for a tour in 2014 I was told about a new Google assistant that will be coming out in the future, and they were partnered with multiple companies that will change the way we use Google search, and it would be with our voice. My response was “That is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard’.?Five Google homes later, it’s not so stupid after all. I don’t have five Google homes because I am a nerd though, and I also didn’t buy all of them because of the convenience. I bought them to be informed, because I want to know how all tech works and be ahead of the game. See, it isn’t about “if” these technologies will take off, but it is more about “when”. From then on out I have bought so many techs, I am involved in the betas in many products, and I stay informed. I don’t stay informed on current politics (unless it’s on my TikTok algorithm). Rather, I stay informed about tech, because I believe it will be either the downfall of our society or will make our life better than we can ever imagine. I haven’t decided which yet, but if the agenda still stays on its current course, I am going with the first one. Right now, the trend is AI tools, specifically ChatGPT. I believe all the new tech has its place, for the most part, and I currently keep up with all the AI tools that are growing rapidly in the market, as I believe you should too. My point is to this article is to make you aware of the fact that I believe the root of many of our problems are based off the “shiny” new toys (like Google Glass for me), which until adopted, and within a price point that people can afford and integrated into our daily lives, it will be exponential technology. When these tools are adopted by the masses it will turn into disruptive technology, where it will displace our current way of living just like the mobile phone displaced landlines. I want to bring awareness to the agenda that is out there, and I could go into where I think technology will be in the future, but that is not the point. This is a fact, you don’t need to like the changes in technology, but you must accept that you have no choice but to adopt it when it becomes disruptive. We are forced into technology whether we like it or not, and that is why I stay informed, it’s not me being a so-called tech nerd. I evaluate every technology that I think will affect our society forever, and I suggest you do too. Whether that is Google Glass or whether that is Tesla self-driving. You will be forced to use it in the future, and as for AI we just opened pandora’s box, and my prediction is that if we don’t regulate it we will be in trouble. So, I just want you to think about what you are paying attention to, because information is power, and I always believe convenience outweighs ethics when technology is implemented. We use the most unethical companies because it is convenient, and we turn a blind eye to the bad things that tech companies do. You can come up with your own conclusion with this article, but I think if you really take my advice into consideration, you will find that we are moving fast in technology and not paying attention.?