by: Hruy Tsegaye
From where shall I begin? My six hour jail time in Juja Police station, my dramatic door to door salesman experience with Kenyan Universities, or how the Ethiopian Government officially advises its travelling citizens to buy dollar from the black market instead of providing it through its commercial banks? Though it’s customary to follow the chronological order, I think I will start from the middle.
Nairobi, adorned with the dying sun’s reddish light, looked a little less scary this time. On my first visit in 2016, I was so startled at the site of the city’s monstrous traffic jam; the entire freeway from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to the city centre, with hundreds of cars stuffed, looked like a graveyard built for cars in the middle of a swamp.
Collecting data that can be analyzed using patterns and trends dates back to the Bayes’ theorem and ‘regression analysis’ that were used in the 1700s and 1800s respectively. For decades, supercomputers have been used to collect data, analyze market research reports, determine patterns of customer preferences, product usage, and the general demand and supply patterns in order to increase revenue and decrease unnecessary costs.
The rapid technological progress of our time is obvious to anyone with an observing eye. The changes that happened in the past few years were not even dreamt a few decades back. If we get the chance to bring back a person who died fifty years ago, he wouldn’t know what to do with a lot of the changes and honestly our dead friend would have been bewildered beyond words. I have been blessed to see the changes firsthand since many of the vagaries occur in my generation, and I have seen instruments get more portable and more efficient through time.
Immortality, rather sound like a Sci-Fi character’s ability, but modern science says this is no longer true. In this exponentially growing technology, the linear life of humans, being a forever one, may not be long coming after all.
