Rewrite paragraph 3 by linking the sentences. Use appropriate linking words or phrases.

TEXT 3

CASSANDRAS NOT NEDEED

1. A question raised in the December 8^th 2001 issue of The Economist Technology Quarterly was whether technology was losing its knack of being able to invent a host of solutions for any given problems; and whether innovation was running out of new ideas to exploit. The soaring cost of developing high-tech products was cited as one of the reasons why technological choice is on the wane, as one or two firms emerge as the sole suppliers. The trend towards globalization was seen as another cause of this loss of this engineering diversity. Yet another factor stifling technological choice was the widespread use of safety standards that emphasize detailed design specifications instead of setting minimum performance requirements for designers to achieve any way they wish. Then there was the commoditisation of technology brought on largely by the cross-licensing and patent-trading between rival firms, which more or less guarantee that many of their products are essentially the same.

2. The majority of TQ readers would have none of it. Three out of five readers believed that diversity was alive and well. By contrast, little more than one in four readers thought there was a serious problem, while one in seven expressed no opinion one way or the other.

3. First, the optimists. Some in this camp saw innovations in strict Darwinian terms, with random mutations throwing off a wide diversity of solutions and the unfit ones being weeded out by the marketplace. "Could it be that the apparent reduction in diversity is simply the result of innovations being judged more efficiently nowadays?" asked one reader.

4. Others thought that, while technology may be losing some of its diversity, innovation was changing qualitatively. One quantum physicist pointed out that science now pretty well understands the forces that shape the physical world. While there are details still to be worked out, technology is stuck with the limits of the physical laws and materials known today. But that does not spell the end of innovation. The problem is not the restrictions imposed by physics, but our still rude application of those physical laws. For instance, the performance of a computer is not limited by the physics of semi-conductors, but by the creativity of the engineers designing the machine. In short, technology of the 21^st century is going to be less about discovering new phenomena and more about putting known things together with greater imagination and efficiency.

5. The largest group of optimists were those who subscribed to the "s-curve" view of innovation. This holds that after any major innovation comes a phase of selection and improvement, followed by a shake-out among suppliers, and a convergence on a single solution that is adopted wholesale by the remaining participants. That innovation seems to be running out of new ideas to exploit is because industry is preoccupied with technologies that are rapidly maturing.

6. And what of the pessimists? Many, in fact, pointed to problems that the optimists ignored. A number worried profoundly about the way increasing knowledge was leading to increasing specialization – with little or no cross-communication between experts in different fields. What was needed, said one reader, was a battery of software agents that were smart enough to traverse boundaries and look for similarities in different disciplines.

7. Others were concerned about the way a maturing technology can quickly become de-skilled as automated tools get developed so designers can harness the technology's power without having to understand its inner workings. The more that happens, the more engineers closest to the technology become incapable of contributing improvements to it. And without such user input, a technology can quickly ossify.

8. A salutary warning for all of those who would prefer to believe the best has yet to come.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 799