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When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means coping thing that work going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what looks is like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new thins, going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
At the macro level, the single world for horizontal progress is globalization, taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere. China is the paradigmatic example of globalization, it 20 year plan is to become like the United State is today. The Chinese have been straight forwardly coping everything that has worked in the developed world. 19the century railroads, 20the century air conditioning and even entire cites. They might skip a few steps along the way, going straight to wireless without installing landlines for instance but there are copying all the same.
The single world or vertical 0 to 1 progress is technology. The raid progress of information technology is recent decades has made Silicon Valley the capital of technology in general. But there is not reason they technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.
Because globalization and technology are different modes of progress, it is possible to have both, either or neither at the same time. For example, 1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and raid globalization. Between the Frist World Ware and Kissinger’s trip to reopen relations with China in 1971, there was rapid technological development but not much globalization. Since 1971, we have seen raid globalization along with limited technological development, mostly confined to IT.
This age of globalization has made it easy to imagine that the decades ahead will bring more junction and more sameness. Even our everyday language suggest we believe in a kind of theological end of history, the division of the world into the so called developed and developing nations implies that the developed world has already achieved the achievable and that poorer nations just need to catch up.
But I do not think that is true. My own answer to the contrition 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 polluting. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do, using only today’s tools, the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scare resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
New technology has never been an automatic feature of history. Our ancestors lives in sate, zero-sum societies where success meant seizing things from others. They created new sources of wealth only rarely, and in the long run they could never create enough to save the average person from an extremely hard life, Then, after 10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760s all the way up to about 1970. As a result, we have inherited a richer society than any previous generation would have been able to imagine.
Any generation expecting our parents’ and grandparents’ that is in the late 1960s, they expected this progress to continue. They looked forward to a four day workweek, energy too cheap to mater and vacations on the moon. But it did not happen. The smartphone tat distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surrounds also distract us from the fact that our surrounds are straggly old, only computers and communications have improved drastically since midcentury. That does not mean our parents were wrong to imagine a better future, they were only worn to expect it as something automatic. Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new ecologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th.
