Bewildered and confused
Technology is moving so fast that those of us who have been around a while may find a lot of things bewildering and confusing.
Why, for example, do so many websites and apps that you never heard of have so many visitors and users?
Why are startup companies whose product or service you don’t understand attracting tens of millions of dollars in investment money?
This state of mind, this disorientation, will only get worse unless we embrace a number of apparent truths.
One is that society always changes and technology changes the most, and technology is changing at an ever-faster rate.
Additionally, we have to accept that there are many technological solutions looking for problems.
In other words, scientists and technologists often make interesting discoveries or develop sophisticated products and services but they have little or no idea how or where they can be applied.
What makes things even more difficult is many people’s propensity to use indecipherable jargon, and the computer technology sector is probably the biggest culprit here.
Anything and everything can be converted to an acronym, and very often, the people using the acronyms don’t bother explaining at any point what the acronyms stand for.
This is something that makes it difficult for journalists and people who aren’t experts in a given field to quickly understand what is being discussed.
Some people obfuscate deliberately, but most people use jargon because there isn’t any other way to explain the details of what are often entirely new technologies.
This is why glossaries are important, and that is why we produced an article listing as many of the terms as we can find about digital manufacturing.
Digitalisation is probably the biggest trend in manufacturing since the Industrial Age.
All this talk of Industry 4.0 and various related things need to be understood by as a wide a group of people as possible because many of those people may end up developing perfect solutions to industry problems.
And they can’t do that if they don’t understand what the problem is in the first place.
It’s inevitable that jargon will continue to exist, but all we are saying is, give simpletons a chance.
