Technology and Globalization: The 21st Century is Underachieving

In Ashlee Vance words, “Elon is the shining example of how Silicon Valley might be able to reinvent itself and be more relevant than chasing quick IPOs and focusing on getting incremental products out.”

Okay, let me ask! What has happened to the Future? I thought we were all crazy about flying cars Or are we simply muddled in this Startup and Blitzscalling system?

People no longer have an optimistic view of technology’s ability to change the world!

Jonathan Huebner, a physicist who works at the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Centre, said,

We are mostly refining past inventions, the frequency of life-changing inventions had started to slow and the number of patents filed per person had declined over time, "I think the probability of us discovering another top-one-hundred-type invention gets smaller and smaller."

"Innovation is a finite resource."

Man has already climbed past the trunk of the tree and gone out on its major limbs, mining most of the really big, game-changing ideas—the wheel, electricity, the airplane, the telephone, and the transistor.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, "That sucks."

Silicon Valley began to look an awful lot like Hollywood. Meanwhile, the consumers it served had turned inward, obsessed with their virtual lives.

“We need to look at different models of how to do things that are longer-term in nature and where the technology is more integrated," said Edward Jung. The integration mentioned by Jung is the harmonious melding of software, electronics, advanced materials, and computing horsepower.

In that sense, Musk comes off much more like Thomas Edison. He's an inventor, celebrity businessman, and industrialist able to take big ideas and turn them into big products. He's employing thousands of people to forge metal in American factories at a time when this was thought to be impossible.

Born in South Africa Musk now looks like America's most innovative industrialist and outlandish thinker, and the person most likely to set Silicon Valley on a more ambitious course. Because of Musk, Americans could wake up in ten years with the most modern highway in the world: a transit system run by thousands of solar-powered changing stations and traversed by electric cars.

By that time, SpaceX may well be sending up rockets every day, taking people and things to dozens of habitats, and making preparations for longer treks to Mars. These advances are simultaneously difficult to fathom and seemingly inevitable if Musk can simply buy enough time to make them work.

As his ex-wife, Justine put it,

"He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It's Elon's world, and the rest of us live in it."

Most technologies that products are being built on today just started to make a name for themselves five years ago. We are living in a fast-paced world. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go back to sleep, technology is everywhere. The highly digital life we live and the development of our technological world have become the new normal.

However, if we want to continue to grow forever, we are going to need new technologies that radically change the way we do things because spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches.

Without technological change, if India doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. Or if hundreds of millions of households in Indonesia and Nigeria were to live the way Americans already do, using only today’s tools, the result would be environmentally catastrophic.

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable. From 1971 on, we have seen rapid globalization along with limited technological development, mostly confined to information technology.

For context, Globalization is taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere. China is a perfect example of globalization; they’ve perfectly copied and mass-produced everything that has worked in the developed world. On the other hand, Technology refers to any new and better way of doing things. But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers.

Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do much with less, so today, we need to imagine and create new technologies that can make the 21st century more prosperous than the 20th century.

We need inventions that will create revolutionary services and breakthrough products. The goal is to create stuff that people may want or that they didn't know they wanted. We need to look beyond the IT sector and into other niches.

The existence of a single unique invention in the olden days only demonstrates the vast potential of creative minds, however, to properly utilize inherent creativity, a flexible social environment (the kind that exists today) is required.

In terms of technological progress, the twentieth century was truly remarkable;

• Humans flew for the first time.
• Vehicles became mainstream.
• We developed nuclear technology.
• For the first time, we left this planet to expand our knowledge of the universe.
• Computers became a thing.
• The Internet was born.

These and many more are what power our modern world.

But to think of it, all these were done with limited technologies compared with what we have today.

Now we’re left dangling near the end of the branches at the top of the tree and mostly just refining past inventions.

This century is only 22 years old, but I think we are slow in terms of technological progress.

If all the technological inventions preached during most TED-X speeches were true, I think we should have something close to the heaven we have in our minds.

We have always been refining and distilling ideas. We don't mine ideas anymore.

This is what I know and the reason why I think we've peaked, but I know we’ve not!

Imagine you were born in 1890;

• You were 13 when man flew for the first time.
• 18 when cars became mainstream.
• Lived through the First World War, which began with cavalry charges and people on horses and ended with airplanes, armored tanks, and trucks.
• 61 when electricity was generated for the first time by a nuclear reactor
• 70 when the computer revolution started, and
• 71 when we left our planet for the first time.

These are exceptional events in a man’s lifetime. We may have all the technology, but I'm still waiting for that "holy grail" moment in our time, perhaps when humans set foot on Mars.

Or you might say technological progress might be speeding up, our ambitions are just greater than in the 20th century, and we still don’t know where we are headed.

Good! Maybe I’m too quick to judge.

But the world is in dire need of inventing new technologies, not just in the IT sector alone.

This is a clarion call to action!

The most significant invention in human culture involves not only mechanical devices but also means of disseminating information to inspire creative minds to build on previous ideas and discoveries and stir up industries to ensure that as many people as possible are exposed to them, like what we have today.

Conclusively

Peter Thiel said in his book:

“In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come. But what makes the future distinctive and important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today. No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it’s going to be different, and it must be rooted in today’s world.”

The uncertainty presents an opportunity!

In order to create the kind of future we want, we need to invent new technologies and innovate on them.

N.B.: Kindly note that this piece contains some of my notes from Peter Thiel's book titled “Zero To One” and Ashlee Vance’s biography on Musk titled “ Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.”