On a flying visit to Dublin, I took my two youngest children to the zoo. Judging by the crowds, it was clear that we weren’t alone in thinking a visit to the zoo was the perfect way to spend a sunny day in the city. Most of Dublin seemed to have had the same idea. At the same time.
Once inside the gates, we set about looking at the wide variety of animals on view within the confines of the zoo. Highlights included the Asiatic lions, Siberian tigers (although we only saw one and it was snoozing), four rhinos, the very cute red pandas and, of course, the meerkats.
Anyway, that’s enough advertising for the zoo. So what does this have to do with technology? Well, it occurred to me some time later that the sheer variety of species in the animal kingdom and the hierarchy of those species provided an interesting perspective on the IT world.
Wandering around the zoo looking at the animals, it was hard to miss the colour code showing where they stood in terms of their conservation status, ranging from ‘least concern’ to ‘critically endangered’ (species that have an ‘extremely high risk of extinction in the wild’). It was also hard to miss the fact that nearly all the species that were listed as ‘critically endangered’ or ‘endangered’ were in that situation purely because of the activities and impact of one species: us.
In the IT world, it’s fair to say that we have a variety of technologies that are ‘critically endangered’ and many others that are already extinct. The difference is that, aside from a few customers and manufacturers, we’re not actively engaged in trying to preserve those technologies. Even fewer of us would be interested in wandering around looking at these dead or dying technologies.
As with the animal kingdom, we also have technologies that are at the top of the food chain but their era of predominance is much shorter and more precarious than it has been for lions and tigers. The evolutionary process of technology is also much faster than it is in the natural world. Many of the creatures on display in the zoo are the products of millions of years of evolution. But many of them are also the end product of that evolution.
In the wilderness
In many respects, a visit to the zoo gives us a view of the world as it used to be, hence the emphasis on conservation. The four Asiatic lions, for example, are status symbols of a changed world. None of them were born in the wild. At present, according to the latest Asiatic Lion Census, there are just over 500 asiatic lions in the wild.
In the IT world, the focus is very much on the future. Even as we seek to come to terms with today’s technology, vendors are busy hyping up the next big thing. But many of those so-called disruptive or ‘revolutionary’ technologies will turn out to be evolutionary when it comes to their adoption. This is because they will not be implemented and installed in isolation but applied on top of an existing IT infrastructure where much of the ecosystem will have evolved from a blend of older technologies.
Right now, we humans sit at the top of the chain in the natural world and, by virtue of our role as its creator, the technology world too. We are the link between the two. But our increasingly ineffectual efforts to preserve and protect the natural world from the consequences of our own actions serves as a warning of how poorly we might fulfil our role as stewards and managers of the technological world. Let’s hope we can learn the lessons that enable us to do better in the future. After all, we don’t want to become one of the star attractions in the zoo of tomorrow, the subject of frantic efforts at conservation as our habitat is increasingly threatened and diminished.
Ltd
