HAVING a good quality of life is synonymous to having a high standard of living. It is also synonymous to having access to quality public services.
In a manner of speaking, it could be said that having a good quality of life is the opposite of having a high poverty rate.
In the Pilipino vernacular, “kahirapan” means not just financial poverty; it also means the difficulty of life itself, ergo not having a good quality of life.
Pardon the run-around, but the point I want to make is that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) particularly its offspring internet technology holds the promise of improving the quality of life for everyone, now and in the future.
Not all of ICT involves internet technology, but all components of the internet or I should say everything in the internet runs on ICT. Hands down, I would say that the internet of today and tomorrow is a far cry from the internet of yesterday.
Those who have experienced slow internet connectivity via dial-up modems would know what I mean, as they are now experiencing broadband connectivity via fiber optics. Never mind the fact that the internet in the Philippines is slower than everywhere else in the region, because the law of supply and demand will put an end to that, before we know it, slow internet will be a thing of the past, just like dial-up modems will become a thing of the past.
No one knows exactly how the menu of internet based services will turn out to be, but practically everyone knows already what the basic ingredients are. Not necessarily in their order of importance, but I would say that these ingredients are the “Internet Cloud”, the “Internet of Things (IOT)” and “Big Data”.
The Cloud, as it is known for short, has brought down the cost of computing and networking, because it makes it unnecessary for any organization to put up their own servers or data centers. IOT makes it possible to connect everything to the internet and to command everything from single device, plus more.
Of course, it could be said that data in many forms has always been there ever since the birth of computing, but mankind has not achieved the capability to analyze large data sets until now.
From the original mainframe-dumb terminal environment, we graduated to the client-server environment and now, we are presently in the browser-based environment. In the years to come and even farther towards the far future, there is reason to believe that all of computing and networking will be cloud-based, browser-based and fee-based.
Perhaps not by grand design, the fee-based approach is consistent with the “user pays” approach, a philosophy that could potentially affect how taxes will be collected in the future. There is also reason to believe that the fee-based public services will become socialized. What this means is that everyone would still have to pay for whatever service they will avail of, but they would only pay depending on their income level.
Although it is not due to a grand design, we have practically gone back to the mainframe-dumb terminal environment, with server clusters taking the place of mainframes, and with thin clients taking the place of dumb terminals.
Strictly speaking, a thin client is not exactly a dumb terminal, but it could function as such if nothing else is installed in it except an operating system and a browser. To some extent, a tablet could also be considered as a thin client if nothing is installed in it except an operating system and a browser, or some apps that could function as browsers. Since thin clients would only cost about a third of a full machine, it would become easier and cheaper now to give everyone a device to access the internet.
Since we have reached an era wherein the server side and the client side have become cheaper, it is now possible for service providers (including the government) to increase the quality of public services and to broaden access to it, and as a result of that, “smart living” will finally happen.
Based on my earlier definition, that could mean living a life without difficulty, in every aspect of human life. To name a few examples, that could mean “smart commuting”, “smart farming”, “smart working”, “smart learning”, “smart healing” and “smart housing”, among many others. Needless to say, we need cheaper energy and faster connectivity to do all these.
It is a known fact that there are technology gaps in the Philippines, which could be anywhere from 10 years to 50 years or more. Even if we could say that technology is market driven, it could also be said that technology should instead be policy driven, because we have already established that we could not leave the deployment of technology to market forces along.
To be able to move forward in this regard however, we need to have an economy that is not just policy driven, but is also science based. The key to that is to have a science culture that could only grow in an atmosphere of innovation.
We have already seen too many technologies that have become obsolete before we could tap them. Let us go beyond that now, and let us close the technology gaps once and for all./PN
