Tech column?

Why Dante's Soma when this is a tech column? Simple. This is a tech column about how research changes our lives, how we interact with it, how it can improve our health, our so then-being, our environment and our relationships with each other. It's about high tech and low tech. It's about how we will avail ourselves of its promises and how industry, individuals and communities use it to achieve their visions of the future.

The column will focus on the innovation coming out of Europe with an emphasis on Italian innovation, which brings me to the title of this blog - Dante's Soma. In his Divine Comedy, Dante wanted to take the reader on a journey of the things that defined his world in the 14th century - heaven, purgatory and hell. His journey could not have been put into perspective without the components he put into play — good versus evil, right versus wrong, have versus have not, action versus inaction.

What if Dante could have made that journey with Soma

But what if Dante could have made that journey with Soma, the miracle happy, feel-good drug in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World? Soma solved every problem, every emotion, every predicament. It made things easier, more palatable. Innovation has done the same for us. From Henry Ford's most valuable contribution to the world, automation, the invention of the modern vacuum cleaner in 1901 to the vision of a computer small enough to fit in an entire room and the introduction of cloud computing, innovation has emerged to make our lives simpler, easier and more productive.

But unlike the local bread baking in the oven behind my house in Italy, innovation will never be done. It's in our human nature to want to improve things and better our lot in life. Whether that’s finding a cure for a disease, controlling how our homes use electricity or discovering distant galaxies, modern innovation represents a full spectrum of tools at our disposal.

Today there is more information and data available on a laptop computer than existed on the entire planet in the year 1500. We have an immense amount of computing power offered to us by devices that are becoming less expensive and more willingly available with each new product announcement. How will we use that innovation now? The advent of the internet has enabled us to save time, however what we do with that time dividend by how we continue to use innovation will be the defining questions that separate us from prior centuries of humanity.