« et al.: lest we forget why today is a holiday | Home | et al.: desperate plea for help: please help me increase truthiness »
Look to 3rd World for tech innovation — and threat!
By WDavidStephenson | January 23, 2008
My personal epiphany about the 3rd World’s potential to leapfrog the Industrial Age (and, in so doing, to take a leadership in development of appropriate technology) came in the early ’90s when I saw a picture in Business Week of a villager in Sri Lanka making a call from a tethered cell phone that serviced the entire community. The photovoltaic array that powered the phone shaded him from the sun.
That picture said it all: no wires for either communications or electricity!
Now there’s
a thought-provoking opinion piece in the Boston Globe about how developing nations are in fact taking the lead in decentralized technologies that are then imported here.
That can have important implications for disaster relief and terrorism prevention and release. In part it’s because foreign terrorists who might penetrate US security will be familiar with this technology and can use it against us. My son told me that insurgents in Baghdad coordinated their attacks using hard-to-trace cell phone calls, then documented killed Americans via their cameraphones.
As Jeremy Kahn reported in the think piece:
“There are now more than 3 billion cellphone subscribers on the planet - the last billion having been added in just the past two years, largely due to explosive growth in India, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. More than half of all cellphone users now live in developing countries, making it the first electronic technology to garner more users in the Third World than the First.”
Kinda places things in perspective, eh? Continued…Â
Sphere: Related ContentTopics: technology, empowering public, collaboration, networked security | |
