Monkey business...

This shall be interesting to follow.

Gary Hart's Weblog. Gary Hart, who has more intellectual depth than most of the other Democratic presidential candidates put together, has a weblog.... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

2:46:28 PM    

Not the end of history

But the cycle continues.  I am sitting here composing my notes for a panel discussion of the Top Ten Advanced Technology Policy Issues at Georgia Tech and this article comes to me via RSS (not a policy issue, but a definite Top Ten Advance).  THe first take on the list of issues focused on things such as WiFi, Privacy, Security,Open Source, the Next New Thing, etc.

But I am thinking of approaching this discussion from a big picture perspective.  Education (K12, Higher ed, lifetime learning), economics (global vs. parochial), philosophy (web as an extension of personna, not a marketing tool), political (big corporation vs. John Q public), financial (need for R&D vs. short term return) and technical (open source, business process, reinventing the world).

I am realizing (and this is just thought streaming) that this "big picture" topics all have sub-categories that overlap -- so, you can construct a matrix that has properties such as inversion that allow you to re-organize as you see fit. 

Take philosophy for example.  One philosophical issue we need to recognize is that technology is not a one-way medium.  WiFi for example supports two way interaction.  Not only can the advertiser (another word for corporate sector) be able to broadcast their message to me, but I can use the medium to extract the information/message I wish to receive (I gots choice!).  But, the debate on WiFi seems to be focusing (besides security) on the issue of "How are we gonna charge them for this?".  Never mind that TV and Radio (at least the air wave variety) don't charge you to receive the transmission --  And, never mind, the spectrum as a matter of policy belongs to the public.  There is a lot of detail to this argument that I am not going to explore right now, but, the point is, we have a basic philosophical issue here of who controls this spectrum, this medium which will decide its future.

Education is also huge, and probably represents the most important issue/challenge to advanced technology in the present and future.  We have to improve our math and science as well as composition and history performance versus the world if we expect to compete in the economy.  It's that simple.  High tech can't grow unless it has a well educated work force to supply the brain power to create innovative things.  And, innovation is our competitive advantage in the global market place.  How many years have we watched developing and second world nations take technological advances from our proving grounds, tweaked them a little, and then blow our manufacturing base out of the water.  It's been happening since the transistor, that's how long.  And now we have angst over losing programming and contact center jobs to Asia?  Once the work is reduced to repetitive skills, we have to innovate again.  It's that simple.  And the more innovation, the more mom and pops leveraging the innovation, the stronger we will be.

Finances -- oh, where are we going with R&D?  Without basic research, there is no future history to worry about.  It's our nursery for the next generation of products.  After you plant the see by improving our schools to produce smarter kids, then you gotta give them a nursery to grow in.  But, the article from Wired on the decline of investment at MIT Media labs is just a sample of the struggles the R&D sector are experiencing, with the possible exception of DOD sponsored activity.  After R&D, early venture capital is a concern.  We don't have enough risk takers in the south, and the risk takers in places like California are re-focusing, trying to figure out the next wave for short term gain -- versus the long term strategy. 

Politics - we can talk about corporate politics, national politics, state politics, even local politics -- what the lawmakers do, how the tech community participates (and even within the tech community - its the big boy, old school lobbyists versus innovators and start-ups), whether the tech community participates, we have to recognize the tremendous role politics plays in the future of technology.  Books have been written and will continue to be written on this topic.

Technology -- and this is about as much philosophy as technical advances.  Open Source -- it is the scourge of mainstream companies (MicroSoft, IBM, etc), is the focus of tremendous intellectual property initiatives -- but represents the future for leveraging technological advances so that everyone has access (both economically and practically).  WiFi -- can it solve the last mile problem, the more general access problem, the "this is definitely the toy you gotta have" problem?  Are we brave enough to re-design processes to allow techology to change the way we live?  Oh, here we go again with philosophy.

Said enough.  gotta re-organize these thoughts into something a little more coherent.

The end of tech history?. Against the backdrop of worries about the imminent demise of Moore's Law, CNET News.com's Charles Cooper asks whether Silicon Valley is really in for a big fall. [CNET News.com]

11:12:56 AM