The Importance of Technology in Business
Whether you use it to build robots, produce food faster or transmit information over satellite networks, technology is the key to a successful business. Using technology to increase profits and create new opportunities for your business helps you remain competitive, even during challenging times.
Technology comes from two Greek words: techne (art, skill or craft) and logos (word or utterance by which inward thought is expressed). The first step toward a technological innovation begins with an individual’s inventiveness; however, social and economic forces strongly influence what technologies are undertaken, paid attention to, invested in, and used. This is what the writer Jacques Ellul called the ‘technological determinism’ of society.
From the early invention of the wheel and the bow to the modern electronic era, the human race has used technology to improve its quality of life and overcome natural limitations. Technological innovations such as fire increased the available sources of food, the invention of the wheel reduced the burden of traveling over long distances, and the advent of communication technology broke down barriers to trade and commerce.
However, not all technological development is beneficial to humanity; the invention of weapons has brought about a host of devastating wars and catastrophes. The negative impact of technology has also been criticized in dystopian literary classics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Theodore Kaczynski’s manifesto, Faust.