[Commons-Law] In this tech-driven world, we can’t be asleep at the wheel

[Hasit seth]

At least somebody in this country (India) is thinking  seriously about
technology and its engagement with society without painting doomsday
scenario of every possible shade. I think a society's future rate of
progress can be easily predicted as inverse to the count of luddities.

Hasit
==================
In this tech-driven world, we can't be asleep at the wheel
Arun Shourie
(Indian Express Online www.indianexpress.com)

Posted online: Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 0000 hrs Print Email
The cost of squandering resources on populist schemes will be paid not
just in missed advantages but also in the resulting social unrest.
First in a three-part series

Arun Shourie
Related Stories

'Parity', did you say?This is about energy, did you say?Rescued from
the abyssThird-class governance can't give first-class response to
terrorismNational security through redefinition

 Among the propellers that are driving the world, technology is one of
the most forceful. Six features about its advance have far-reaching
consequences for India:

• To start with, what has seemed impossible suddenly begins to seem possible

• Second, whatever seems possible comes to pass

• Third, it comes to pass sooner than anyone had thought possible

• Fourth, with each decade, it comes to pass sooner and sooner. And
there is good reason for that: the advances are cumulative

• Fifth, the advances are interdependent. Today, drug discovery is
becoming critically dependent on biotechnology. Biotechnology, in
turn, is critically dependent on advances in other technologies — DNA
could not have been decoded but for advances in IT.

• Sixth, each advance has effects that spread farther than anyone had
imagined. Today, the technologies that rivals have mastered are a
major influence on the balance of power between countries. Companies
rise and, just as swiftly are wiped out by some new Bill Gates working
out of a garage. The livelihood of thousands disappears overnight as
entire professions are wiped out and new ones appear.

Till just the other day in India, telephony was confined to fixed line
instruments; PCOs were a leap forward — they provided unimagined
access to those who could not get fixed line connections, and
thousands got a new way of earning a living; today, with millions
having mobiles, fewer go to PCOs.

Nor are we anywhere near the end: there is intense competition among
service providers, each has invested crores in infrastructure; but
now, thanks to advances in internet telephony, you can call the US or
Europe for almost nothing. What will that do to the thousands of
crores invested by companies in setting up telecom infrastructure?

The effects on national security are even more evident, just as they
are of even greater consequence. Terrorists remind us every day of the
consequences of the miniaturization and increased lethality of the
technologies of violence. But the lesson is not lost on states. As
technology advances, economies become progressively integrated. That
induces the Chinese to acquire capabilities to hurl what they call
"the assassin's mace" at the "acupuncture points" of other, modern,
integrated societies — national power grids, air-traffic control
systems, rail-traffic control systems, financial and banking
operations, communication networks — so that, by disrupting and
corrupting them simultaneously, the societies are thrown into disarray
for those few vital moments.

Lemmas

For us in India, pushed around as we are ever so often by Luddites,
these features of technological change hold several lemmas.

First, as a consequence of technological and economic changes, every
country is bound to be buffeted by massive dislocations. Take what is
today the most successful example of propelling and managing change:
China. According to official Chinese estimates, the "floating
population" is anywhere between 120 and 140 million. As they lose
rights to medical treatment and education once they leave their place
of residence, the 20 million children in tow are now bereft of these
services. And this is the situation in a country that has today the
most purposive government among emerging economies.

So massive dislocations are inevitable. But equally important is the
related lesson: the march of technology will not be slowed down just
because we have not been able to handle the dislocations or are
paralysed by the fear of them. A country paralysed by fear of such
dislocations, unable to decide which of competing courses to adopt,
which stops change, will not just fall behind. It will be wiped out.
And for a simple reason: its rivals won't slow down for it to solve
its problems.

Third, as change is so rapid, as it is cumulative, falling behind for
a while makes catching up very difficult. When affairs are stationary
or change is slow, even if we falter for a while, we can catch up soon
enough. But when change is rapid, once we falter, the one who has
captured the lead is able to go on lengthening the distance. China and
India were at par in the mid- and late seventies. China began reforms
in 1978. Our political class — weak, imprisoned in slogans of the past
— had to wait for a breakdown in 1991 to initiate reforms. That lapse
has made all the difference. Today, even in the Indian market, in an
industry like electronics, many of our manufacturers are traders in
Chinese products.

Nor is one leap enough. One has to keep forging ahead. Again, the
contrast is evident; China has sustained its momentum of reforms for
25 years; in India, splintered "coalitions" give everyone enough power
to block everything, they leave no one with sufficient power to push
anything.

Nor is it enough to catch change by the forelocks. As advances are
interdependent, if we falter in one discipline, we will be drowned in
a cascade.

Fifth, keeping up requires huge investments. We have had one major
electronics complex — in Mohali, near Chandigarh. Even to this day it
is not able to fabricate chips and the like at the submicron levels
that have become customary. Building a new fab with the requisite
capability costs $3-4 billion a piece. China is building six of them
in one go. Countries that cannot muster up that kind of investment
will have to forego those technologies or become hopelessly dependent
on others for them.

The effects will not be just on consumer items, and exports. The fabs
are vital for national security. Not being able to construct the
latest ones is to put the country in danger. Countries which waste
resources on boondoggles - like the Employment Guarantee Scheme, or
unaccounted subsidies - don't just put themselves at a competitive
disadvantage but at risk.

Next, the new technologies require ever higher, ever more complex and
ever changing skills. "The masses", "the common man" just do not have
them, and are not going to have them in the foreseeable future. It
follows that countries which allow standards of higher education to
fall; countries which do not institute systems to continually upgrade
skills; countries which appoint and promote personnel on
considerations other than merit (e.g., birth); countries which lose
their best minds to others, will fall behind.

The technologies that are revolutionising the world today are
developed by minuscule minorities, by microscopic scientific and
engineering elites. To fail to value these elites, to trample in the
name of "equality" the incentives and work-environment that would spur
them to do their best in our country is to forfeit our future. One has
only to bear two facts from recent history in mind as an antidote to
the nonsense which progressives feed us so often. One, the leaders and
movements that have shouted the most about "equality" are the very
ones who set up the most tyrannical regimes, the ones that came to be
marred by the most brazen inequalities — who has not read of the
nomenklatura that came to rule, and eventually ruin, the USSR?

Second, when you are accosted for being an elitist on this score, when
you are lectured about the "revolutionary creativity of the masses",
remind yourself of the fate of Mao's Great Leap Forward, of those
backyard steel furnaces, so idolised by our revolutionaries.

We thus have a duality. On the one side are two facts: without the new
technologies, the country will be endangered; and these technologies
will be developed by tiny elites. On the other side is the equally
undeniable fact: the new technologies will just not provide the
massive employment that the growth in population and labour force
necessitate in India. Even a factory producing automobile parts looks
like a Japanese "lights-out" factory. There are few persons on the
shop floor: production is all CAD-CAM. The precision that is today
demanded by manufacturers who will use these components in their cars
and trucks is measured in microns; the dimensions have to be measured
by laser beams. This means that for the kind of numbers that need to
be absorbed - we need to create 80 million jobs in the next five years
— we have to put massive resources into the only activities which can
absorb such numbers: agriculture and infrastructure.

Thus, as Deng would have said, we have to walk on two legs. And that
reinforces the point we glimpsed earlier: the cost of squandering
resources on wasteful, populist schemes will not just be that we will
not have those fabs, and thereby forfeit both competitive advantage
and national security; we will foment social unrest.

Given these truisms, what must we be doing?

(To be continued)