The adoption of new technologies is accelerating, leading to questions. The rate of change and the collateral impacts to global societies is uncertain. Also uncertain is the impact to economies growing and declining in their participation at different stages of technology adoption. Societal impacts prompt governments to try and help.
Governments have attempted to identify the winners and losers to guide national industrial investment, education, and commercial supports. The failure of governments to consistently achieve these goals (e.g., domestic semiconductor production, parallel domestic drug production in India) is also an identified characteristic of technology adoption.
The rate of change and the collateral impacts to global societies is uncertain. Also uncertain is the impact to economies growing and declining in their participation at different stages of technology adoption.
In periods of high economic turbulence and stress, governments and pundits seek to identify the megatrends and essential steps to create a future they envision. The historical record of governments projecting labor market outcomes is poor. In the early 1990’s the shortage of USA software professionals was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of jobs by the mid-1990s. The incredible growth of India, and now other nations like China, in outsourced European and North American technological work was not clearly forecast by anyone. The India experience has created massive employment for educated workers that resonates with entrepreneurial efforts in Silicon Valley and globally.
The current turbulence again sees a desire for governments and pundits to predict, and choose winners and losers, in global economy of uncertainty. What is known is that transitions and responses to the next innovations will occur in the blink of a historical eye. Few predicted the rise of Indian technology jobs, the transformation of China to global manufacturing hub, and rippling changes. Changes now interact as interconnected demographic, ecological, and technological change. Mathematically the ‘network effects’ are observed as chaotic and unpredictable. Picking winners and losers is likely to fail for governments.
The technology adoption benefits can be transitory. South American raw-materials based booms in the 19th Century did not lead to future global power status. Many countries see natural resource exploitation structuring economies that cannot consistently improve mass demographic benefits. Emerging technologies in metals, chemicals, and energy did not grant long term prosperity to all first movers. Choices to sustain national prosperity are more difficult than riding a boom economic wave.
India now must choose wisely. Invading global or domestic enterprises may devastate economic sectors, or, like computing technology, prove to be the key elements of a future. If choosing is likely to fail what decisions are needed to enable the future to have prosperous outcomes?
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