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Shift Happens: An Exercise in Imagination

By crooky | March 23, 2007

In Fall, 2006, Karl Fisch - a teacher at Arapahoe Highschool in Centennial, Colorado - put together a PowerPoint presentation at the request of the school’s administration to show at a faculty meeting. The presentation was supposed to update the school on the state of technology in the school and how it is changing the learning environment. After a few (very boring) slides on the gear that the school had, Karl (clearly, a huge AV Geek) decided to put together a presentation with the gravity and drama of an Al Gore lecture/presentation and chose to take the topic a few steps further to include some thought-inspiring facts about education and technology globally.

Here is that presentation:

I started out on Wednesday evening by reading this week’s edition of The Economist - a thought-provoking read at the worst of times. Then I watched the presentation you just watched. Then I sat down with my wife and watched Babel. In sequence - telegraphed moves of the slumbering giants that are the world’s economies a la The Economist, a chalk outline of the trajectory of our children so compellingly presented by Karl Fisch, and the questions asked but never really answered by Babel.

At the end of the Karl Fisch presentation, he asks “what does it mean” and lets us down by simply stating “shift happens”. A clever understatement that eschews the tough answers by referencing a fading pop-culture phrase. What all of this rapid change - in power structures, in demographics, in technology all mean is that the rules of the game are changing. Not for everyone, mind you - that’s what Babel reminds us.

“Third generation fiber optics has recently been separately tested by NEC and Alcatel that pushes 10 trillion bits per second down one strand of fiber.”

Fantastic! Soon Myspace pages will be viewed 100 times a day instead of 30 times a day while Japan’s youth turn increasingly inward in what has been described as the world’s only post-apocalyptic society. Japan is a nation of early adopters - of techno-optimists. Technology has not solved their problems. I’m not suggesting that technology is the cause of their problems but instead of asking “what does it mean” when we see Fisch’s presentation, we should think “who cares?”

What about in Africa where, 3 years ago, it was reported by the WHO that 3,000 children a day were dying of malaria. Now I’m not trying to place guilt on the Western world for not solving Africa’s problems, I do take issue when I hear that Nintendo spent “$140 million [on] research and development” in 2002. This is in contrast to the fact that global spending on malaria research last year was $323 million - an estimated 90% shorfall of what needs to be spent on malaria research each year. Think about it. We, as a species, are willing to spend comparable amounts of money on video games and a deadly childhood disease. The result - we have fantastic game consoles and children in Africa continue to perish unnecessarily at an alarming rate. Ironically, this call to arms on malaria comes from a true philanthropist and technology mogul - Bill Gates (who also makes video game consoles).

Before you throw your hands up and dismiss me as intoxicated or naive or something worse, I want to tell you about a local company called Flexible Solutions International (whom I had the fortune of interacting with as part of my work with NanotechBC). They make neat environmentally friendly chemicals that you pour over the surface of water to “seal” it from outside contaminants and the keep it from evaporating. Most recently, FSI won approval from the US EPA for their mosquito abatement product. Hmmmmm… mosquito abatement. Isn’t that the vector for malaria? Don’t they actually have problems keeping standing water potable and malaria-free in Africa? You can see where I’m going with this. We have the technological solutions we need to solve some of the worlds’ problems but we’re unwilling to do so. Instead, this wonderful technology will probably be used to keep someone’s pool in West Vancouver from evaporating this summer and to keep mosquitos off the golf course.

As policy-makers or technology evangelists, what do we make of reports like this one on ICT infrastructure in Afghanistan? “Copyright and intellectual property issues”? “E-government”? Are we talking about the same Afghanistan? How is ICT infrastructure going to help a country that has been at war since the 1970s? Is e-government going to make the Taleban obsolete? Not likely. My point is that technology that does not move humanity forward in a meaningful way is a Western luxury.

Don’t get me wrong - I enjoy my Western luxuries but I sincerely believe that what we do here in Canada must be considered in the global context. That’s a touchy subject but I know that Canadian scientists love challenges. Why not apply our national brain trust to some worthy technology challenges? MIT does it with their IDEAS competition. I think some of these projects will do infinitely more good than the absurd $100 laptop for the third world idea. I know I’m going to take a lot of heat for that comment so let me go on the attack by saying that I have always thought the idea was a bad one and am not shy to say so. Show me one way that the PC has improved Western society and I’ll show you 20 ways it’s made it worse.

Shall we all go out and smash our PCs then? Absolutely not. Should we assume that laptops are going to bring literacy, democracy and economic prosperity to the third world? Absolutely not. What is the PC doing for our children? They’re slipping in literacy and grammar while becoming more socially isolated. I don’t want to draw too many parallels back to Japan but for a country that embraces technology to an amazing degree - their kids are largely screwed up. Is this what we want to export to the developing nations of the world?

Wired was covering “appropriate technology” back in 2002 and they hit the nail on the head - the best technologies for the developing economies of the world are those which enable individuals to improve their quality of life in basic ways and/or enable that individual to be an economic player. The Super MoneyMaker is a prime example. Cheesy name aside, this cheap irrigation pump has delivered entire families from poverty. After a few years of positive income, maybe some of these people will work their way up to getting a telephone (a practical albeit old-school technological solution for interpersonal/emergency communications) after which point they might give a sh*t about a $100 laptop, MySpace and Google. In the meantime, let’s focus our energies on developing technologies that try to narrow the gap between the world’s poorest and the world’s richest.

In 2049, when Fisch predicts a $1000 laptop will have the computations capabilities of the entire human race, it will look back at the R&D investment decisions we’re making today and it will blow it’s silicon brains out. That will be man’s crowning achievement - a laptop that is so ashamed of the fact that the billions of research dollars that went into creating it could have, potentially, saved millions of human lives that it will take its own “life”. I hope it posts about it on MySpace before it “pulls the plug”.

So, to summarize, “what does it mean”? It means that we Westerners are developing on an exponential trajectory while the rest of the world is dying. Without meaning, where is the quality in life that all of this technology promises to provide?

Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years. He’s a policy analyst, a communications professional and a competitive intelligence consultant. After work, he fancies himself a comedian of sorts.

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