Technology Democratisation - tech for the many, not the few

Ever since the industrial revolution changed the way we were able to manufacture and create, there have been machines built that have enabled "ordinary" people to achieve feats on an industrial scale that were previously the reserve of huge businesses or professionals. From sewing machines that provided an increase in stitching speed by a factor of 1000, to the steam engine which removed the need for horse and cart caravans and started the ball rolling towards making travel accessible to all, and many more besides.

This enablement has driven invention and innovation, with everyone able to stand "on the shoulders of giants" to use these tools  to create something entirely new. In many cases the tools have removed any barrier to entry for those wanting to, for example, sculpt a masterpiece using personal "hand held power tools", to communicate with loved ones across great distances over a telephone rather than having to wait for the post, and of course the “personal computer” enabled productivity gains and entertainment from the office to the home.

It’s not just about hardware though, with software we can look too to the meteoric rise of cloud computing. This enabled everything from the streaming of video to the hosting of personal websites, none of which require any programming skills to create or maintain. In the website space there are a multitude of site building services that allow you to "drag and drop" features for sites such as blogs, storefronts or image galleries, customising them without any knowledge of the code behind required, or the storage tech they reside on. This very site is in fact built using the service from Squarespace, a company offering website building, hosting as well as other services.

This empowerment - specifically of website building - is becoming ever more vital as people worldwide begin to distrust and push back from social media platforms. In light of scandal after scandal, with personal data at risk and algorithms that are built to serve up sensational rather than accurate content, greater numbers are turning to building their own personal sites, giving themselves a platform that is not selling their content to advertisers, that isn't subject to content filtering and - perhaps most importantly - isn't likely to block their content if it doesn't fit in with the platform's political agenda.

So what about the future? There are already big players such as Microsoft offering infrastructure "as a service" where you no longer need to invest in an entire virtual server to host a web application, you can simply pick the services your app requires [such as databases, storage, web hosting, etc] and pay dynamically for only what you use. This also provides bandwidth to users on a usage basis [growing the bandwidth as the user demand rises rather than over-specifying from the outset] once again lowering that bar to entry from the traditional corporates to small businesses and individuals.

This trend is set to continue, with the value and power of individuals in the push for innovation across the tech sector, even the most complex platforms and concepts are [once fully understood] being packaged into neat services that those with ideas for real world applications can access. From the machine learning "playgrounds" that allow users to build models with the backing of the computing power and code from the likes of Amazon, to quantum computing; where most people aren't going to have the ability to house a quantum computer they could still make use of the service of quantum computing through a similar "pay as you need" type arrangement.

While the future is far from clear, one thing we can be sure of is that the march to provide power and accessibility to the many, not the few will continue to be a constant message from the technology community as the newest ideas and breakthroughs continue to be shared rather than guarded. After all, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants now.