I wrote this as a comment about a post on Digg about Ray Kurzweil and I think it went to a surprising place (for me) so I'm going to repost it here
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It's a natural tendency to fear the unknown, and to recoil from something new because it may be imperfect or dangerous, when with the system in place we already KNOW it's imperfect and dangerous. And, in my view, a lot of it is simply that people have a certain paradigm that needs to be overcome. Like, on the technology end, there's a view that technology will fly to the rescue of, say, our automobile-centered society, with improved efficiency, some radical new power source, or what have you. While this is possible, I percieve it as far more likely that the solution will be in fundamentally re-engineering our transportation economy and infrastructure, one of the consequences of which will be saying bye-bye to the personal automobile (or at least greatly reducing our reliance on it). Thus, the innovation is not only new technology, but in some ways a reliance on (relating back to the issue of learning from the third world) traditional methods of community organization, and adapting these to the demands of modern life.
Whoo. I definitely agree that competition rules the system. For example, in China, using an acre of land for industrial purposes yields something 7.5 times the income of using that same acre for agriculture (there's obviously a wide margin of error for a statistic like that, but you get the picture). As such, industry is taking over, because it is far more competitive. These sorts of things are huge hurdles to the third world as far as building a society that is driven by local initiative, customs, and values, and that contributes to the global economy in some way other than being exploited by wealthy nations.
Of course, this is all a matter of overcoming the numerous limitations to information ecology that exist worldwide, if we are able.
It's a natural tendency to fear the unknown, and to recoil from something new because it may be imperfect or dangerous, when with the system in place we already KNOW it's imperfect and dangerous. And, in my view, a lot of it is simply that people have a certain paradigm that needs to be overcome. Like, on the technology end, there's a view that technology will fly to the rescue of, say, our automobile-centered society, with improved efficiency, some radical new power source, or what have you. While this is possible, I percieve it as far more likely that the solution will be in fundamentally re-engineering our transportation economy and infrastructure, one of the consequences of which will be saying bye-bye to the personal automobile (or at least greatly reducing our reliance on it). Thus, the innovation is not only new technology, but in some ways a reliance on (relating back to the issue of learning from the third world) traditional methods of community organization, and adapting these to the demands of modern life.
Whoo. I definitely agree that competition rules the system. For example, in China, using an acre of land for industrial purposes yields something 7.5 times the income of using that same acre for agriculture (there's obviously a wide margin of error for a statistic like that, but you get the picture). As such, industry is taking over, because it is far more competitive. These sorts of things are huge hurdles to the third world as far as building a society that is driven by local initiative, customs, and values, and that contributes to the global economy in some way other than being exploited by wealthy nations.
Of course, this is all a matter of overcoming the numerous limitations to information ecology that exist worldwide, if we are able.
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