Must look to 3rd World for tech innovation — and threat!

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?  Let’s also not forget the potential for emergent behavior, “wisdom of crowds,” etc. when you get a few billion people joined by wireless technology and social networking apps. That’s kinda networked homeland security on steroids.

Equally important is that it illustrates Stephenson’s Law #1:

find a solution to your problem by thinking of someone who shares the same problem, but to the nth degree, because their pain has probably motivated them to find an answer.

Just as Southeast Asia and Europe have always been ahead of is with cell phones (am I right this is because their landlines, controlled by state monopolies, were always so wretched?), developing economies that can’t afford expensive infrastructure are just dispensing with it!

The article says:

“There are numerous industries in which the new new thing is being designed for the developing world, and only later reaching the United States or Europe. Examples include Motorola’s Motofone, designed with emerging markets in mind, is thinner than its popular Razr, gets up to 400 hours of standby on a single battery charge, and has a screen specially designed for text messaging that works using reflected light, with no need for an internal lamp. Oh, and it will retail for just $30.”

Perhaps even more important in terms of its global promise, ” Intel has begun field tests of a new wireless broadband standard that could connect billions in the developing world to the Internet cheaply - and, if it works, will probably become the standard for the rest of us.”

This burst of Third-World ingenuity is because global companies want to tap the huge potential markets when all of the world’s poor are aggregated (reminds me of Michael Porter’s inner-city initiatives, based on the premise that 1 sq. mile of an inner city neighborhood contains more concentrated wealth than a square mile of suburban homes on big lots), but that will require both smart use of limited resources and lower costs. What’s not to like about that here at home?

It’s time for homeland security to be as concerned about technology, especially telecomm, coming from There, as what’s flowing from Here…

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