We are all enjoying the benefits brought by our technology development and the speed of new innovations and inventions; more importantly, many innovations and inventions are no longer coming from the demand for military purposes, like previously, some are directly invented to serve consumers’ demand, for example, the driverless cars. However, as we know our technology is not perfect, it could happen that our development is misguided by our technology limitation due to several reasons.
Firstly, due to technology limitation, when we are developing some products, we face some technological difficulties. In order to develop the products as soon as possible, companies usually do not directly solve the technical difficulties which need more investment and longer time, instead, they may find an easier way to get around the problem and provide products with acceptable imperfection. The classical example for this is our keyboard layout. The QWERTY keyboard layout is the most common layout for most of our computers. It was first developed in the early 1870s. Many people have suggested that this type of layout was initially designed to separate often-used keys farther apart to prevent jams due to the technical issue at the time. The layout is definitely not perfect for typists, as when using the English language, it is true that typing strokes are more often done by the left hand than the right hand, this is helpful for left-handed people but unfriendly to right-handed people. However, as we have been using this layout for over a century, people are used to this layout. Even nowadays jams are unlikely to occur with the modern keyboards, people are still using the imperfect keyboard layout, which was designed to get around a mechanical problem in the past.
Moreover, when we are developing a system, it involves many different small parts, each of the parts have different development speeds. However, since developing a system takes a very long time period, it is not strange to see in such a large system, it has the most advanced technology with some very outdated technologies. This always happens to the national defense industry. When developing a defense system, such as fighters or ICBM, the hardware is more likely to be very advanced while the software could be very outdated. This is because the update and development speed of software is much faster than the development speed of hardware. Since these defense developers have to combine the hardware and the software together, they need to choose the most advanced technology at the time. As developing a new aircraft usually takes around 20 years, when the development finishes, the majority of the technologies used is very likely to be 20 years old. To some fields, 20 years old technology could still be very advanced, for example, engines, materials, which involves long time periods of experiments and mature theoretical development and research; to some field, 20 years old technology could be extremely outdated, the update period in the IT sector is usually believed to be 18 months, the 20 years old technology in this sector is too old. However, since the system is a complete system, when one part is changed, all other parts have to be changed accordingly; therefore, if we want to update the software or other outdated technologies, the whole design has to be changed, and this is very costly and even when the changes are done, we could find some technologies become outdated at that time.
Overall, technical difficulties may force our developers to seek cheaper solutions to get around these issues and such imperfect solutions could increase the long lasting issue of imperfection. If we develop more technologies based on the imperfection, it could expand the scale of the imperfection (the imperfect keyboard layout does not affect typists, but since the increased use of computers, almost everyone who has access to computers is affected by the imperfect keyboard layout).
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