When we think about the future, we expect progress. That progress takes place in two forms. Horizontal progress or comprehensive progress means copying things that work from 1 to N. Horizontal progression is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical progress or deep progress means doing new things. Vertical progress is hard to visualize because it requires something else. If you take one typewriter and make 100 typewriters in the same way, you've made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and you build a word processor, you've made vertical progress.
At the macro level, globalization is a term for horizontal progress. Under this, things are made in one place and they work everywhere. China is the best example of globalization; Its 20-year plan is to be like the America of today. The Chinese are copying every good or service that has worked in the developed world: 19th century railroads, 20th century air conditioning, and even entire cities. They skip or change some steps in the process of making things - like for example they're going straight to wireless without installing a landline, in the end they're just duplicating it all.
Globalization and technology are two different ways of progress, so both at the same time, either it is or it is not. For example, globalization and technology developed rapidly from 1815 to 1914. There were attempts to reopen relations with China in 1971, between World War I and Kissinger's visit. At that time, rapid technological development was happening in China but globalization was still not the same. Since 1971, we have seen rapid globalization with limited technological development, mostly confined to IT.
In this age of globalization it is easy for us to imagine that the coming decades will bring more homogeneity and equality. Even our everyday language suggests that we believe in a kind of end of technological history: by the division of the world, we mean the division into so-called developed and developing countries, the "developed" world countries having already achieved Have achieved things worth doing, and poor countries are racing to achieve these things.
But I don't think that's true. My answer to the paradoxical question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If millions of families in India adopt the routine of Americans and only indulge themselves in western lifestyle, the results will be disastrous for them and for the environment. Adopting the old ways of making money all over the world will only create destruction and not wealth. In a world of scarce resources, globalization is temporary without new technology.
New technology has never been an automatic feature of history. Our ancestors lived in stable, minimalist societies where success was simply the possession of other people's things. They created only a handful of new ways to make money, and those measures, in the long run, were not enough to save the average person from a hard life. Then about 10,000 years later, agriculture in the ancient era, windmills, pottery, and the astrolabe in the 16th century, and then suddenly the modern world made steady technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s until about 1970. As a result, we have inherited a richer society than any previous generation could have imagined.
No generation other than our parents and grandparents, who in the late 1960s would have thought this progress would continue, would have expected to have much cheaper electricity for home use, and a Would you like to take a four-day tour and take a holiday on the moon? But it didn't happen. Our smartphones also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely out of date: only computers and means of communication have improved dramatically. This doesn't mean that our parents were wrong in imagining a better future, they were just hoping for something automatic. Our challenge today is to both imagine and create new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th century.
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