Your reason for choosing this book may be personal or professional. I thank you from my heart’s ventricle for picking a book that cares about you and your survival in this techy world. Obscure part to thank someone from? This obscurity is inspired by the fate of millions of people who think technology is not their cup of tea.
However, in the 21st century fast-everything culture, knowledge is broadly available and is profuse than ever but has become masked with layers of meaning that few people understand the important points the creators make. And forget about applying the learned in their life. Most of this knowledge comes from theses and dissertations and do not talk to the minds of a nontechnical person. The discussion is so specific that few people outside the domain can relate, let alone apply in their lives.
As modern technology advanced, the now and here overpowered the yesterday and tomorrow. There’s barely a vantage point from where to look at the past, present, and future technologies. We’re at the crossroads of the innovative, breathtaking, and spectacular noise hurtled at us continuously. We do not know where the noise is coming from, nor do we know what it means. That’s why we need a spot. A spot to get the sense of how big or detailed the web of technology is that integrates our life.
This book is for those who want to read a book on technology but find it too intimidating. I aim to give the readers a wide vantage point and a bit of everything to get started in this convoluted world. While doing so, I might seem to scribble on the surface, barely scratching through, afraid of going to the deep. But that would be nothing more than intentional. I attempt to lure the beginners but not shoo away the mid-rowers.
There are two groups of people in the world: one who understands and uses technology daily and the other who has no idea how technology functions but may have been using it to some to no extent. Topics like artificial intelligence and space technology can quickly put a person to sleep if you start with DDoSes and ballistics. Yet, ordinary citizens are hurled with dozens of techno-keywords every day as if something exciting is cooking that would ease their transition into the job market. Technology has gone from as simple as starting a fire to as complicated as running the Large Hadron Collider. (The Large Hadron Collider is a mammoth machine on earth that accelerates particles at a very high speed only to collide them.)
Learning is akin to night sky watching. With only a quick sweep at the feeble stars, you can narrow down on the interesting ones. That’s the extensive. You “jack” the extensive—that’s your interest gnawing on the available knowledge, expecting to witness more details of the stars. If you’re keen enough to zoom through a telescope, you’ll see galaxies of stars stuffed in that very single dot. And that’s the intensive. Without an extensive view of things in your discipline, intensive exercises mean nothing more than drilling a nail into the hardest spot on the wall.
The rationale behind my writing this book is simple. I want the inexperienced and the freshly baked out to revisit simplicity to keep up with the frontlines of bleeding-age technology. I’ve tried to keep everything simple and authenticate my data and facts through citations from trusted sources. And these sources are not books found in big libraries only the big brains can access. Anyone can instantly access them without even a subscription for the first few visits, at least most of them. Feel free to note these sources—the ones that interest you.
The book is divided into two parts: Chapter 2 and the rest. Chapter 2 is a fictional story that zooms into the life of a character named Falcon and his futuristic world. Based on the day-to-day technologies Falcon uses and experiences, the rest of the chapters extrapolate them into perspective in real life. However, don’t sweat on matching every other technology in the story to its corresponding explanation in the book. Not every technology I discuss in Chapter 2 is present in the book and vice versa.