Wednesday, October 15, 2003

A Fool With Tools Is Still A Fool - Thoughts On Technology Ran across a great essay yesterday, Living Virtuously in the Information Age, by Dr. Quentin Schultze, and quite frankly it has really made me think about the impact of technology on both societal wisdom and personal wisdom.    With the proliferation of information and information gathering tools, I find myself continually tempted to avoid the intellectual discipline of "thinking through" ideas - an exercise very important to the development of wisdom - and simply doing an online search to find out what everyone else is thinking - and then selecting my thoughts from the buffet of ideas served up byGoogle or Feedster.     WISDOM:  The ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting; insight.   Using online searches to help gain wisdom can certainly be a good thing - but relying solely on information aggregation - and bypassing the intellectual exercise of "thinking through" ideas certainly is not "wise".   In his essay Dr. Schultze calls out the fact that "Being wise is far more than being informed. We cannot become wise merely by being well-connected to information".   Can we lose the ability to discern (a key component of wisdom) by relying too much on technology?   I submit we can - do - and will continue to - unless we are cognizant of the fact that we can lose that ability to discern and continually challenge ourselves to "think things through".  10:08:33 PM    comment []

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DOD Orders Suppliers To Use RFID Tags By 2005 DOD Supplier Policy on RFID requirements will certainly provide the tech sector hardware and networking arena a strong revenue opportunity in the coming years.   Two excerpts from the COMPUTERWORLD policy announcement online story on October 8th are as follows: Mike Liard, an analyst at Venture Development Corp. in Natick, Mass., said suppliers will have to make massive investments in infrastructure to support the coming mandates, with little return "aside from meeting the mandate." Hardware costs for RFID readers and networks in just one warehouse could run as high as $100,000, he said, adding that suppliers would also have to integrate RFID into their existing information systems. He couldn't estimate how much that would cost. Vinnie Luciano, marketing vice president for mobile computing at Symbol Technologies Inc. in Holtsville, N.Y., said the Defense Department would have to invest "somewhere between tens of millions and hundreds of millions" in RFID hardware and networks to support the new policy. ( COMPUTERWORLD ) 2:20:52 PM    comment []

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