Globalization 4.0: The Coming Cognitive Platform Revolution
In The New York Times Sunday Magazine for April 03, 2005, Thomas Friedman has a powerful essay: It’s a Flat World, After All
The core of his argument is this:
This has been building for a long time. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and labor. Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 — the thing that gives it its unique character — is individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally? But Globalization 3.0 not only differs from the previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening the world and in how it is empowering individuals. It is also different in that Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by European and American companies and countries. But going forward, this will be less and less true. Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse — non-Western, nonwhite — group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.
As far as it goes, Friedman makes a valuable contribution to the conversation about our future we have been avoiding. It will be hard and will require much of us if we are take advantage of the situation. However, Freidman does not discuss four concepts that that would have made his case even stronger:
1] Change in the role of the center vs the edges of the network
2] The technology platform that has enabled and supported the changes he discusses is about to be obsolete. The new platform will dramatically increase the speed of the changes Friedman enumerates.
3] Freidman does not point to current research projects that illuminate the handwriting on the wall.
4] A change in the number of dimensions we citizens naturally operate in. The paradox is that as the world loses dimensions, we the people are gaining them.
1. As we move to embrace the architectural and network model used so very successfully by the internet, the center is being emptied and made generally obsolete. The action, responsibilities, opportunities and threats are now at the edges. As Bob Frankston says, “He with the most infrastructure loses”.
Consider that the legacy communications companies can only depreciate their hugely expensive investments in central switching gear over a period of decades. Compare this to the innovation cycle in voice over the internet technologies. It is measured in months. This mis-match between legacy depreciation cycles and the innovation cycle of the VoIP market spells death for the legacy companies. This will be just one example of the “creative destruction” Friedman writes about.
2. Friedman does not see the coming of Cognitive platforms connecting via Reality Broadband [40 gigabits of symmetrical connection] over Open Spectrum. This is just around the corner. The handwriting is on the wall for all to see.
Note: we all want reality so we all will want 40 gigabits of connectivity. Why would we want to settle for less? What does this make the connectivity offered today by the telcos and cable companies: Tinyband. Of course this also means the real name for G3 bandwidth provided over cell phones is: Nanoband.
Everything Freidman writes about assumes that we will only have to deal with today’s dumb, rule following computers connected over tiny-band via spectrum artificially treated as a scarce resource with a very finite capacity to carry bits.
Today’s computers are dumb because they do not know what or where they are, have no meaningful awareness of their environment, the other devices in that environment, nor how to cooperate with those others to achieve results greater than the sum of the parts. This is what David Reed calls “Cooperative gain from collaborative actions at the edges.”
The future will belong to the coming platforms that will be goal seeking [heuristic] cognitive devices communicating and cooperating with each other at reality bandwidth speeds over Open Spectrum that has no known limits to its bit transporting capabilities. In fact, there is reasonable evidence that Open Spectrum’s capacity to carry bits actually increases with the number of users.
Here is a link for more on Societies of Cooperating Cognitive Devices
As Friedman points out, the West’s legacy business baggage, in this case the FCC and ITU, is currently preventing us from adopting this more advantageous approach to spectrum management. I should note that Freidman does not discuss the barriers to the future that the FCC and ITU are throwing up as they try to preserve the antiquated notions of spectrum management. How long can we afford to sustain this competitive disadvantage?
3. Freidman does not point to current research projects that illuminate the handwriting on the wall. Three of these are:
4. Lastly, all of the above will allow us to accelerate the change that is already afoot. In the Industrial past, citizens were too often seen as one dimensional consumers who were expected to behave like Pavlovain dogs in response to marketing and political messages sent at them. Today, we are already seeing regular citizens use all of the technologies Friedman talks about to become creative producers of content they then distribute, as well as consumers. Citizens are becoming multyi-dimensional. For more on this see The Tyranny of the Industrial Hub & Spoke Paradigm
Freidman is correct, however, when he asks if we will be wait to be shown the future or will we be the inventors of it? The truth of the matter is that we ain’t seen nothing yet. It is the new platform that will be the true steroids that drive “creative destruction” to undreamed of extremes. Just like that super volcano near Java. If it blows ….
5 comments Jock Gill | Economy, Empowerment, Intelligence, Politics
This is extraordinary. Jock, your new thoughts on C2C go well beyond the existing C2C blog dialog, and this one here presages what will be possible with the CISCO AONS architecture when combined with RFID and semantic web/synthetic information archictures. You are right on target–the people will rule, and will help one another in ways that corporations can neither defeat nor duplicate. Bravo. I like this so much that tomorrow I am going to do a press release pointing to your web site. Keep thinking!
Friedman annoys me. He finds out things I learned years before and then proclaims them as Holy Writ because HE discovered them.
This has been going on for a long, long time now. The present pre-occupation with the Middle East and oil will be seen by history as a Grand Distraction.
The question should be, how do we take advantage of their distraction (now that it’s being recognized) and what do we propose to do instead?
Jock:
I agree that Friedman didn’t go as far as he could have. However, the article at the link below doesn’t predict; rather, it lobbies for a particular outcome (in particular, the realization of the agendas of the groups whom I call the “Orthodox End-to-Endians” and the “Spectrum Anarchists”). While each of those groups is strongly idealistic and believes it has everyone’s best interests in mind, each has a very extreme agenda which is marked by selective blindness to various aspects of reality.
Friedman at least sticks to his knitting; he describes what has already happens and makes limited extrapolations based on existing trends. The article to which you link below is far less conservative and (again) is biased by a passionate desire for particular outcomes. Ironically, it lacks credibility for the same reasons that George W. Bush’s arguments for radical changes to Social Security lack credibility: its predictions appear to be engineered to motivate the reader to favor a particular agenda. Friedman avoided this, which is one of the reasons that his article is much more compelling.
–Brett
I wrote him a letter:
Dear Mr. Friedman,
please allow me to comment on your recent article “It’s a Flat World, After All”, published on April 3 in the New York Times. I am a 23-year old student from Germany. Coming from a background of having fled East Germany with my parents and sister in 1984, I have always been strongly interested in the globalization theme you write about and furthermore may have at least some valuable experience in this regard as well.
I liked the article you wrote about your first steps in the field of journalism, about that impressive teacher of yours. Keeping with the spirit of that article I hope you take my criticism to the heart. My sense that better ideas ultimately prevail – developed during school times – has rudimentary survived until today.
From a few of your documentaries on CNN I infer that you are a person who takes direct feedback on his work seriously and on occasion even responds to it or weaves it into his stories. (I have to admit that the views of your collegue Paul Krugman are closer to mine than yours are. But a letter I send him about a year ago elicited no response.)
[i]I had Lufthansa business class…[/i]
Isn’t it easier to comment positively on the state of the world from this perspective?
[i]Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse — non-Western, nonwhite — group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.[/i]
Strange. In American culture the idea of a clash between civilizations seems to be predominant, at least much more discussed. I seldom found proposals for other approaches like the “Projekt Weltethos” of Hans Küng or a mentioning of Goethe concept of world literature. When it was introduced to the United Nations in November 2001 (“Dialogue among civilizations”)there was no coverage in the U.S.-media whatsoever.
[i]”Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,” said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape (…).[/i]
“All the tools (…) easily available”? That is plain untrue. And “a” (14-year-old) implicates “many” or even “every”. Closer to reality would be “few”.
[i](…) the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. (…) anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.[/i]
The North-South divide is as big as ever, from what I can extrapolate. Google is not the solution for this nor the Holy Grail, just a search engine.
[i]”The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the wall went down just as the windows went up — the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.[/i]
Correction: The Wall kept people inside East Germany. The rest was already capitalistic and “free”. As far as I know did Apple originally invent the interface, Microsoft used its market power to spread it.
[i]That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight.[/i]
The costs are not zero. In real life there is indeed a digital divide. Plus, space-time still counts. Man is not digitalized yet.
[i]No country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than India. ”India had no resources and no infrastructure,” said Dinakar Singh, one of the most respected hedge-fund managers on Wall Street, whose parents earned doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the University of Delhi before emigrating to America. ”It produced people with quality and by quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get out.[/i]
In some places China actually treads workers “like vegetables”. Once used and ill they are thrown away like garbage.
[i]I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China.[/i]
How many people own factories? From whose point of view do you write? For whom?
[i]This is Wal-Mart’s specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China.[/i]
Is this what it all boils down to? Efficiency? This is not enlightenment anymore.
[i]The last new form of collaboration I call ”informing” — this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.[/i]
That does not provide orientational knowledge at all. What is most important is the ability to sort out what is relevant, not unlimited data.
[i](…) wireless access and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with any device.[/i]
Again – a categorical “any” is just not true. This is as uncritical as it gets.
[i]The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language.[/i]
Ditto above. Sorry, but your style has increasingly contours of economical propaganda.
[i]No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, but it is open now to more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it in history. Wherever you look today — whether it is the world of journalism, with bloggers bringing down Dan Rather; the world of software, with the Linux code writers working in online forums for free to challenge Microsoft; or the world of business, where Indian and Chinese innovators are competing against and working with some of the most advanced Western multinationals — hierarchies are being flattened and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and more and more through horizontal collaboration within companies, between companies and among individuals.[/i]
Keep in mind that neither linux nor multinationals existed before either.
[i]I am talking about the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia. Their economies and political systems all opened up during the course of the 1990′s so that their people were increasingly free to join the free market.[/i]
The dreamless figures of economy and inherent necessity fill the old place of freedom. Free is the person who exactly wants what he should.
[i]Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, ”You don’t bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies” — like India, China and Russia — ”with rich educational heritages.”[/i]
English as a lingua fracta, spoken yet not fully comprehended is no rich education. (I realize that you often quote other people but nevertheless you make the selection.)
[i]They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job there and explains why it is already the most productive research team at Microsoft: ”Remember, in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”[/i]
Further down you lay emphasis on the individual. This is contradictory.
[i]an electronic-game company from Bangalore, which today owns the rights to Charlie Chaplin’s image for mobile computer games[/i]
I am not impressed. This is not real culture.
[i]“That is what is going to happen to so many jobs — they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most opportunity.”[/i]
These are words that have something to hide. They paint more than they actually say.
[i]“If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work if he knows how to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web site and have an e-mail address and you are up and running.”[/i]
Simply not true. Definitely not from bottom-up perspective.
[i]“(…) if you are diligent and clean in your transactions, then you are in business.”[/i]
Where is enlightenment?
[i]The main challenge in that world was from those practicing extreme Communism, namely Russia, China and North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those practicing extreme capitalism, namely China, India and South Korea. The main objective in that era was building a strong state, and the main objective in this era is building strong individuals.[/i]
The opposite is true. The senctence the economy cares for the individuum is not valid anymore.
[i](…) broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help every American become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.[/i]
What exactly are “portable pensions”? Reduced pensions?
[i]While the other end of the hot line might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the United Nations, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in ”From Russia With Love.” No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: ”Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?”[/i]
Even though being unjust, communism represented an antidote to a today totally unleashed predator capitalism. As for India, the views of Noam Chomsky and native Arundhati Roy though extreme contain some core of truth to them. They go as far to call it semi-faschism.
[i]Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers.[/i]
The movement of labor eastwards is indeed mainly for salary reasons. And by the way: “dirty little secret”, “bad guys”? Why this tone?
[i]The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering.[/i]
What about the quality of those degrees? In Germany for example, they are getting inflationary and at the same time more superficial.
[i]When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ”Tom, finish your dinner — people in China are starving.” But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ”Girls, finish your homework — people in China and India are starving for your jobs.”[/i]
Large portions of these societies are still starving. The last Indian elections as often portrayed as a votum on exactly this issue.
I felt the strong urge to point out the discrepancies I felt throughout your cited article (an impression older ones already build up) and hope I did so in a critical yet constructive way.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best regards,
Jean
in line with dana’s comments and some of jean’s critique, see matt taibbi’s spectacular deconstruction of _the world is flat_ in the “new york press”:
http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm