Get used to being an “earthling”
Of course, then you’ll have to get used to being a Solar System Inhabitant (SSI?) or some other abstracted categorization. It’s all just a matter of time. In the mean time, you might want to consider that if you continue to think and believe that you are an “American” and everyone else is a “non-American” then you are going to continue to grapple with the issues presented in this article.
With all of the technology and innovation that we create, we further enable others – and other countries – to grow and develop more rapidly. This is an ongoing process of creation, replication, commoditization, and abstraction.
With the first step, something new is created … I’ll refer to this as a ‘substrate’ … be it biological or technological. If it is valued and works within an environment, you will see this new substrate replicated and copied. This is where things like “network effect” begin to kick in and real growth occurs. The next stage is commoditization … where the relative cost of this substrate begins to erode and this only adds to the adoption and usage. Lastly, there is the abstraction phase. This is where the substrate has become so available and present that a new substrate emerges and builds on top of the previous substrate.
John Smart writes about this a lot, and introduced me to these intertwined evolutionary models. From his web site:
There is apparent further support for the resource limits argument when we consider the nature of biological growth within any particular species. The classic pattern is called logistic or “sigmoidal” (“S curve”) growth, where population growth is initially exponential, but matter, energy, or space limits and competitive species interaction (another form of resource limits) always slow down this growth, leading to a “saturation” in a population size over finite time.
This same model can be applied to the technologic substrates that we are creating. And as we improve and commoditize these products and solutions they are usable by more and more of the worlds population. As we enable the worlds population, they are able to – and hungry to – contribute to the momentum by using these enabling products and solutions to create new ones. The cycle continues.
What once could only happen in American – due to the conditions present for the emergence of technology – is now able to happen around the globe. The communications infrastructure required for teams of people to create, and then market, their products and solutions has expanded via the Internet and is now global.
This article discusses some of the growing trends that we are actually enabling. People worried about “American Jobs” ought to begin to think about “Earthling Jobs”. We are going to see a growing trend of technologically enabled humans from all parts of the globe beginning to fight for their “fair share” of the “American Dream” … and are going to be doing it at home. They are not coming to American to get it. They are turning it into the “Earthling Dream” and are building in their own countries.
I hope that the average American is ready to work just as hard – or harder – for their dreams. They are going to have to.
Creative Class War: Reverse Brain Drain in US?. AlterNet is carrying an interesting article by CMU’s Richard Florida called the Creative Class War. The article details the decline of what the author terms the “creative class” in the US and how these people are now both not immigrating to the US and how US policies are resulting in a reverse brain drain of educated people fleeing the US. Among examples cited are how Peter Jackson’s (LOTR) new movie facilities in New Zealand contributes to the decline of Hollywood, IT outsourcing trends, how MIT had to cancel a large AI project “because the university couldn’t find enough graduate students who weren’t foreigners and who could thus clear new security regulations,” down to individual examples such as stem cell researcher Roger Pederson leaving California to do research in the UK because “they haven’t made such a political football out of stem cells.” Overall, a fascinating and thought-provoking article. [kuro5hin.org]
