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<p>WILL NEXT-GEN CIVILIZATIONS BEGIN IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES?</p>
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<p>(Thanks to ndtv.com for image)</p>
<p>INTRODUCTION</p>
<p>The fishermen of the Indian state of Kerala had a big problem, prior to 2001. It was this: The fish they caught were intended to be sold at market, but the only way they had of finding out if they had a buyer was to go to a market and engage in face to face communication. If the market they went to had no need of their fish, they would not be able to visit another, because the markets were about ten miles apart, the fish were perishable and the markets closed at 8AM. Choose the wrong buyer, and the whole catch would have to be thrown back into the sea. Economists call this a ‘coordination problem’.</p>
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<p>But then these workers got hold of technology familiar to us all that matched buyers and sellers much more effectively. They got themselves mobile phones. Now, while they were still out at sea, they could phone ahead and arrange the best deal for their catch.</p>
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<p>Now, I am not really interested in fish, but rather the fact that these workers made the jump from what was essentially stoneage communications to 21st century communications. What if developing countries can achieve a similar leap forward with agriculture, banking, education, energy, money and civil engineering and so on? If so, what they might develop into would be a new kind of civilization. Some people, for instance Marshall Brain, call this a ‘4th generation civilization’. But, since I am unsure as to how many civilizations there have been, I will play safe and call it a next-generation civilization.</p>
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<p>NEXT-GENERATION CIVILIZATION</p>
<p><img src="https://s3.postimg.org/3kwz8pw0z/image.jpg" width="640" height="360"/></p>
<p>(Thanks to wallpapercave.com for image)</p>
<p>So what is this next-generation civilization? I see it as being a civilization that uses the only resources we have- natural capital and human potential- with maximum efficiency. Because it has achieved this, it has eliminated- as far as is physically possible- the obstacles to greater social cohesion and personal development. Citizens of next-generation civilization would find themselves much further up Maslow’s famous pyramid of the hierarchy of needs than is the case for all but a few of the nations’ population today. This would make next-generation civilizations the best platform we have ever had for realizing the transhuman pursuit of social and individual excellence.</p>
<p>WHY THERE?</p>
<p>If we acknowledge that a next-generation civilization could be achieved, why should we suppose it would emerge in developing countries? In many ways, these are places that have barely reached the 20th century. Dreaming up some glitzy, high-tech civilization sounds like an undertaking for people of affluent countries with plenty of time on their hands, not something that would concern those struggling to get by on one or two dollars per day. And then there is the matter of corruption. Stories abound of the terrible misallocation of wealth that goes on in the world’s poorest countries. The African Union estimated that some 25% of its annual GDP is lost to corruption. As they are so far behind, and the corrupt and criminal tend to thwart dreams of a better life, why look to such countries for the rise of NGC?</p>
<p>ADVANTAGES</p>
<p>We should not think that developing nations have no advantages. There is, for example, the ‘latecomer’s advantage’. There is no rule that says a country has to retread all the steps that lead to the modern world. They can leapfrog straight to the latest technologies and practices. Indeed, this leapfrogging makes a great deal of sense, because the most modern technologies often do the same job as predecessors, only more cost effectively and less wastefully. The cost of purchasing and burying copper wire for a communications infrastructure would be more than $100 million. Cell tower infrastructure would cost a relatively small tens of thousands of dollars. If a city like Zinder in South Niger were to adopt PCs, then by the time 10% of the population were using them, the power they consume- 1,500 KW- would exceed that of all households today. Mobile devices, on the other hand, would consume just 74KWs, and as they run off of batteries they would be more useful in areas where power outage is a common experience. It is for reasons such as these that countries like El Salvdore and Panama have adopted mobile communications faster than the USA.</p>
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<p>The fact that the rich nations have well-established systems and infrastructures could be an impediment to progress. W. Brian Arthur, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and author of ‘The Nature of Technology’ has written about how established technologies and practices can delay the adoption of new methods, even though those new methods are superior. In 1955, the economist Marvin Frankel noticed that cotton mills in Lancashire were not using the more modern and efficient machinery. This was because the old brick structures that housed the old machinery would have to be torn down before the new machinery could be installed. As Arthur wrote, “The outer assemblies thus locked in the inner machinery and thus the Lancashire mills did not change”. To this day, whenever a technology is so interwoven with the fabric of everyday life or business practice that replacing it seems too much bother, we say it has become ‘locked-in’.</p>
<p><img src="https://s11.postimg.org/9s4bde9wz/image.jpg" width="640" height="457"/></p>
<p>(thanks to Wikipedia.org for image)</p>
<p>ATTITUDES</p>
<p>There is also a psychological aspect to consider. Established technologies and practices can lead people to adopting certain ways of doing things, and upstart technologies that obsolete the old ways can be threatening. Sociologist Diane Vaughan called this ‘Psychological Dissonance’ and wrote:</p>
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<p>“(We use) a frame of reference constructed from integrated sets of assumptions, expectations, and experiences…This frame of reference is not easily altered or dismantled, because the way we tend to see the world is intimately linked to how we see and define ourselves in relation to the world. Thus, we have a vested interest in maintaining consistency because our own identity is at risk”.</p>
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<p>Therefore, established technologies, infrastructures and methods can create hysteresis- a delayed response to change- that holds the new at bay, at least until the old ways simply cannot be stretched any further. So, it could be that developing countries which lack many of these established infrastructures and technologies, would adopt the new and accommodate themselves more quickly to the methods and practices they make possible.</p>
<p>CORRUPTION</p>
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<p>(Thanks to thefifthcolumnnews.com for image)</p>
<p>As for the problem of corruption, we should not think that it only goes on in the poor nations of the world. The reason why the corruption that goes on there seems so overt and in-your-face may be because it is immature. In the West, centuries of adjustments and fine-tuning have evolved institutions that divert real wealth from those who create it to those who set the rules. As world-renowned linguist and social philosopher Noam Chomsky pointed out, using violence in order to get people to obey, as the Soviet Union did, will ultimately fail. What is needed are systems of indoctrination to ensure that citizens agree to what the ruling class want. This can be achieved by, among other things, entering the school system and educating the nation’s future workforce towards the ‘correct’ way of thinking (one third of textbooks in American schools are provided by corporations) and censoring material that questions state dogma (a study by Vincent Navarro of John Hopkins University that found a correlation between class and race and wealth inequality was refused publication by every major medical journal in the US). These and other insidious practices successfully hide much of the elite wealth appropriation that goes on from view. It would be no mean feat to successfully un-entangle those immoral methods of wealth creation from the beneficial forms that is vital for any successful civilization.</p>
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<p>But much of the corruption in developing countries will be relatively easy to deal with. Much of it consists of plain old bribery, for instance having to pay your boss before he will hand over your wages. If you were working online for a foreign company and your wages were wired directly into your account, that form of corruption would be much reduced. Moving to a cashless society using mobile devices that recognize their rightful owner and refuse to work for unauthorized users- say by using biometrics to identify users- would leave folks less vulnerable to theft. In countries like Niger, Senegal and Uganda, parents may have to pay bribes to get their children into school. With Internet access and availability of free educational resources like Kahn Academy and Granny Cloud (the latter being a service in which retirees voluntarily give some of their time to running lessons over Skype) that form of corruption is rendered obsolete. Many other forms of overt corruption would be harder to get way with in a country where the mass adoption of camera-phones and social networking makes surveillance possible.</p>
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<p>Futurists forecast some pretty astonishing technological capabilities becoming available as NBIC (nanotech, biotech, information tech and cognitive science) ride up Kurzweil's curves of exponential progress. It would be a truly great thing if the amazing possibilities of such technologies unlocked the entrepreurial and creative potential of the bottom billion and transformed their lives into a civilization that is the envy of the world.</p>
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