Development of the information society is the development of the deep-set structures of society in network form of organization and growth that is based on innovations. Information economy relies on productivity growth based on innovations, unlike the hype of what is called the new economy. Several studies have shown that, during the past few years, growth has increasingly been generated by technological innovations combined with networked forms of organization. Networks are becoming increasingly common, and the role of innovations is growing, also in the labour market. Using Robert Reich’s vocabulary, routine production jobs are declining, while the importance of symbolic analytical work and personal-service work is increasing (Reich 1991; for the changes in the labour market, see also Carnoy 2000; Benner 2002). In Richard Florida’s vocabulary, the concepts of creative and service jobs are close to symbolic-analytical work and personal-service work. The information-society agenda is not the same as an information network or Internet programme. The development of technology will help only when it is combined with changes in the underlying structures. 1. Increasing international tax competition 2. The new global division of labour 3. Population ageing 4. Increasing pressures on the welfare society 5. The second phase of the information society 6. The rise of cultural industries 7. The rise of bio-industries 8. Regional concentration 9. A deepening global divide 10. The spread of a ”culture of emergency” The new global division of labour: Routine production moves to cheaper countries (the “China phenomenon”). China and India are particularly on the rise, and other emerging large countries include Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia and Brazil. The most developed countries cannot rely on routine jobs in the future, so they must specialize in creative work that is based on higher expertise and work to improve productivity both through increased added value and the development of production processes. At the same time, large developing countries whose role in the global market is increasing offer extensive markets for the products supplied by developed countries. This marks the next phase of economic growth. The second phase of the information society: from technological to social development The first phase of the information society focused on the development of technology, such as network connections. In the second phase, which has now begun, technological development will continue; however, the focus will shift to larger social matters and the main focus will be on changing the ways in which we work. The rise of bio-industries: The next phase of the information society will see the rise of bio-industries. Genetic engineering will become another key technology besides IT. Medicine, biotechnology and welfare technology are other examples of emerging fields. The importance of these sectors is increased by population ageing (for example, gerontechnology, i.e. technology that makes life easier for the elderly). A deepening global divide: If we carry on with “business as usual,” inequality and marginalization will continue to become aggravated both globally and nationally. During the first phase of the information society, i.e. from the 1960s to the turn of the 21st century, the income gap between the poorest 20% and the richest 20% of the world’s population doubled and is now approximately 75:1. This development is maintained particularly by the distortions of world trade and the knowledge divide between developing and developed countries, so the situation can be improved considerably only by changing the structures of world trade and by bridging the information divide. The spread of a “culture of emergency”: The pace of development is accelerating, which increases the volatility of economies and creates a “culture of emergency” in workplaces. Deepening social gaps increase tensions, which in turn fuel the emergency culture. This trend is characterized by increasing instability. The challenge of achieving development that is sustainable in both human and environmental terms plays the pivotal role in such a risk society. Development Scenarios Regional concentration For the first time in history, the world’s urbanization rate has exceeded 50%. Large concentrations of expertise account for an increasing proportion of innovations and economy, as being at the leading edge of global competition requires larger entities. Regional concentration continues and pressures on further concentration increase. If we look at this development from the geographical perspective, it can be said that the fiercest competition is carried out by and between three leading regions: the United States, Asia and Europe (see Figure 15.1 below). On a global scale, Europe is currently at a disadvantage, while the US model clearly has the upper hand. The United States alone accounts for one-third of the world’s economy and half of the R&D work carried out in the world, and its military budget almost equals that of the rest of the world. Many Asian countries develop at an annual rate of almost 10%, and global production and markets are increasingly moving to Asia. In the IT field, for example, by 2010, half of the world’s semiconductors are consumed and a third of them are produced in Asia (excluding Japan). For example, China currently produces more experts in science and technology than the EU or the United States (in 2000–2002: in China, 590,000; in the EU, 440,000; in the US, 385,000). A global market for expertise has emerged, where the development of Asia forms a completely new challenge to Europe. The EU clearly lags behind the United States, for example in terms of the region’s attractiveness to Asian experts. Allowing some simplification, there are currently three especially dynamic models in terms of technology and economy, yet they are based on very different social models. These can be called by the following titles (taking the representatives that are most often referred to; for additional information, see Castells and Himanen 2002; Himanen and Castells 2004b; Wong 2004): 1. The “Silicon Valley model,” i.e. the American neo-liberalist model — the predominant model (United States) 2. The “Singapore model,” i.e. the Asian state-run model in which the objective is to attract multinational companies to the region — an emerging model (also in China and India) 3. The “Finnish model,” i.e. a European combination of the information society and the welfare state, which is represented in its most advanced form in the case of Finland. Outside these regions and models, the status of the poorest developing countries continues to weaken. For example, most of the African countries between the Sahara and South Africa are becoming pauperised. One-fifth of the world’s population subsists on less than a dollar a day and has no access to health care or education. A continuously widening knowledge divide underlies the increasing welfare divide. Each of the above models has currently problems that can be characterized with the following scenarios: 1. The Silicon Valley model refers to the neo-liberalist scenario of “leaving the weak behind.” Although this scenario is technologically and economically dynamic, it comes with a high social price. For example, the Silicon Valley area itself produced 60 millionaires a day at the end of the 1990s, but they had to move to fenced residential areas, because a society that leaves some of its citizens in the margin is a society of fear. One-fifth of the population lives below the poverty line, has no health insurance and is functionally illiterate. In Silicon Valley, the opportunities to receive education depend on the economic position of your family, so a class of marginalized people has emerged, for which crime is the only means of survival (particularly the sale of narcotics to those who have succeeded). Paradoxically, the world’s biggest proportion of the population that is in prison is in California, a leading region in terms of development! In addition, sending someone to prison for a year is more expensive for society than sending them to Harvard to study! The adoption of the Silicon Valley model would mean unfettered neo-liberalism. 2. The Singapore model is based on tax competition, i.e. “a race to the bottom.” This has also been a dynamic model, although the limitations and problems of competition have recently become evident. As other countries can always reduce their tax rates more in order to attract multinational companies, production keeps moving to cheaper and cheaper countries. In the case of Singapore, companies have moved, for example, to China and India. The outlook is not good in the long run if the region has not developed adequate local expertise and innovativeness, exactly what has happened in the Singapore case. If a region is to succeed in competition in the long run, it must have innovative ability; it is not sufficient that the government takes action to attract multinational companies. (The Singapore model is also patronizing, which is another problem: the government attempts to control its citizens’ freedom, although the information society cannot be creative if people do not have free access to information and the freedom to think otherwise. This is a great paradox also for China, which idealizes the Singapore model.) 3. The third scenario, i.e. the current European combination of the information society and the welfare state, has the danger of “the dead hand of passivity.” According to this scenario, people keep protecting all the industrial era structures of the welfare state, but they do not recognize that the future of the welfare state is only possible if the welfare state is reformed with the same kind of innovativeness that the information economy has gone through. In practice, passivity leads to a situation where welfare needs to be cut back more and more and the dynamics of the economy fades. People protect their own vested interests and envy other people for the benefits that they get. This can also be called the society of envy. Fortunately, there is a fourth scenario. It is possible to combine the welfare state and the information society also in the future if only we have courage to revise this model appropriately. Therefore, under the current circumstances, the welfare state is best defended by those who speak for its reform through innovation. The fall of the welfare state can be prevented by moving from a reactive to a proactive policy: we should no longer focus on reacting to something that has already happened; instead we should act beforehand and boldly lead the way. In practice, if we are to meet global competition by implementing the above-mentioned development scenario and adopting the values described above, we must take into account the following key concepts related to social development: 1. A creative economy 2. A creative welfare society 3. Humanly meaningful development 4. A global culture The emphasis is largely European, although many of the issues apply much more largely. 1. A Creative Economy Under the pressures of international tax competition and the new global division of labour, developed countries can only rely on expertise and creativity, as routine jobs and routine production will not help them to compete with the cheap Asian markets. Developed countries must enhance productivity through innovations: creativity will make it possible to increase added value and improve the efficiency of production. Spearheads of a creative economy: a stronger IT sector, culture and welfare: Developed countries must actively look for new areas of economic activity where creativity can make a difference. Although developed countries should not be fixated on certain fields only, they will find new potential in culture and welfare, the major emerging sectors in the second phase of the information society. Therefore, the creative economy can be strengthened by examining the opportunities of the cultural sector (including music, television, film, computer games, literature, design and learning materials) and the welfare sector (innovations related to the reform of the welfare society, i.e. biotechnology and gerontechnology, which helps elderly people to live independently) so that they become new spearheads for the creative economy in addition to the IT sector. Interaction between IT, culture and welfare will also generate completely new opportunities. The key sectors of the creative economy are shown in Figure 15.3. The two new spearhead sectors have vast potential. For example, the cultural sector generated a global business of USD 1.1 billion in 1999. This sum was distributed between the following fields (learning materials, which constitute an enormous business as such, are not included): The welfare sector, which includes health care, medicine, etc., is an even larger business which continues to grow, for example because of new biotechnological inventions and population ageing. Europe could leverage its expertise in this field, for example in public health care, by exporting it to other regions. However, success in these areas in the global competition requires increased investment in national R&D activities (financing of creativity). The leading countries are soon investing almost 4.0% of their GNP in these areas, so government decisions along these lines are required if we are to succeed in the global competition in the near future. The most important question is how new public investments are directed: additional financing should be directed to the cultural and welfare sectors. Financing must also be directed to the development of business models and marketing. Europe, for example, has clear problems at the end of the innovation chain, which is shown below (in practice, innovation does not progress in a linear fashion; the factors described in the figure form an interactive network): Europe is innovative in terms of products and production processes, i.e. idea creativity, but less creative in terms of business models and brand building, i.e. business creativity that helps to transform ideas into income. Therefore, financing is required in order to promote research and development (including training) related to business creativity. Richard Florida has combined the creative economy with the concept of the creative class. According to him, this rising class consists of very diverse groups of people, such as researchers, engineers, writers, editors, musicians, film producers, media makers, artists, designers, architects, doctors, teachers, analysts, lawyers and managers. At the turn of the millennium, the creative class accounted for approximately one-third of the work force of advanced economies (Florida 2002). The above-described spearhead sectors are part of an economy that is based on extensive creativity. The sectors of the creative economy are shown in Figure 15.4. The success of the above-mentioned economy in the global competition depends on the degree to which taxation encourages this kind of activity. If we are to meet these challenges, our taxation system has to promote work that enhances the common good, i.e. taxation must promote job creation, entrepreneurship and creativity and thus make it possible to finance the welfare society. It is essential to note that the welfare society is based on the tax revenue generated by work, not by the tax rate. Tax revenue can be generated only if the system encourages people to work. Although participation in unhealthy tax competition will not help maintain the welfare state, it must be pointed out that excessive tax rates can also undermine the welfare state. The welfare society is based on the world’s best expertise and work. The financing of the welfare state depends, first and foremost, on the achievement of a high employment rate and on society’s ability to associate innovativeness with positive expectations by applying tax rates that encourage work. A taxation system that encourages work also acts as an incentive for skilled employees to stay in their countries and makes it possible to attract skilled labour from abroad; this will in turn alleviate the problems caused to the welfare state by an ageing population. Management and work culture in a creative society: The government can, of course, only pave the way for creativity, as government decisions as such do not enhance creativity. There is a distinct difference between the industrial society and the information society. In the industrial society, the bulk of the work consisted of routine tasks, and the result of work depended largely on the time that was devoted to it. The old work ethics, according to which work was an obligation that you just had to fulfill and suffering was thought to strengthen the character, made economic sense in the industrial era. In the information society, however, work depends increasingly on creativity. This means that the industrial work culture turns against itself also in economic terms: if people feel that work is nothing but a miserable duty and that the main point is to fulfill orders, they do not feel a creative passion towards their work, and yet this passion would make it possible for the company to continually improve its operations and stay ahead of the competition. The industrial era created a time-oriented management culture that was based on control, whereas the creative economy requires a result-oriented management culture that makes space for individual creativity. This development is connected with the hierarchy of man’s motives, which was presented above. Whatever we do, we are at our best when we are passionate about what we do. And passion evolves when we think that we are able to realize our unique creative talent. People who have such a passionate relationship with their job have access to the source of their inner power and feel that there is more to them than usual. People who feel that their work has a meaning do Challenges of the Global Information Society 353 not become tired of their work; work fills them with energy and gives them joy. The Lisbon strategy, launched in Portugal in 2000, recognised the importance of ICT for growth in modern economies, and opened the way to the launch of the first eEurope action plan in Feira in June 2000. Since that time parts of the ICT sector have faced a slowdown, but the information society has continued to expand. The creation of a favourable environment for the spread of ICT remains an important responsibility for policy makers. As information and communication technologies become more pervasive, the future is very much based on the development of new services that run on high-speed networks. Economic theory shows that welfare, competitiveness and employment can only be sustained in the long run if they are based on productivity growth and innovation. Over the years, we have favoured in Europe a combination of economic and social progress, with built-in safeguards for equity on the basis of solidarity. However, economists have recently been warning that Europe’s model can only be sustained if we significantly increase productivity and innovation. GDP can grow by increasing employment or by growing productivity. Productivity growth comes about by investing more in capital or in labour, that is, increasing skills. Investment in ICT is clearly a critical enabler of productivity growth, and, for that matter, also of innovation. However, the key question these days is not so much one of technology, but how technology is used and the way it is affecting GDP growth through improved productivity. We should not focus on technology just for the sake of technology. The industry-level analysis shows the superior performance of the US in ICT-producing manufacturing (in particular, ICT equipment) and ICT-intensive using industries (in particular, financial services and distributive trades). Europe in turn has achieved very high productivity growth, outpacing the US, in communication services, and, in particular, in the mobile sector. ICT Revolution and its Global Effects: During the second half of the last decade the world witnessed the emergence of a new reality—the Internet—and the great expectations on the effects that this new technology would bring about in many sectors of society. Each month, new publications appeared forecasting the changes that were underway. According to them countless traditional corporations would close down under the attack of new virtual competitors; the processes of vertical and horizontal integration would be reversed and a new batch of entrepreneurs would emerge, generating almost immediate wealth. The escalation of expectations, with its correlative financial speculation, came to an end when the bubble burst at the end of 2000. We then entered a phase—in which we are now—where, at the time of being aware of the potential of change that lies within technology we realize that those foreseen changes would come about only as a result of significant efforts in the medium to long term. The frenzy that took place at the end of the last decade left us with a promising scenario for the future ICT applications. Indeed, important investments in international broadband and wireless telephony infrastructure - whose implementation eventually caused substantial investment losses—provided a solid material base from which to develop multiple applications. Moreover, the maturation of new financial mechanisms such as venture capital completed the scenario to make innovations possible. Markets are now starting to distinguish which business models are generating revenue, providing a key learning experience for entrepreneurs, governments and investors. There are successful businesses—Amazon, e-Bay or Google to mention a few—currently in the consolidation phase, but on a parallel and probably less publicized front, a number of e-government services have emerged around the world, bringing benefits to citizens. The innovation potential has also expanded. The growing capabilities for information processing, the surge of Internet-based global collaboration networks, plus the development of electronic and biologic sciences have resulted in a wealth of high potential innovations that are starting to bear fruit (interactive television, wireless broadband connectivity and genomics are good examples). We therefore seem to be facing an auspicious scenario. However, recent examples and the analysis of previous technological revolutions, show that expectations are not always realized. Innovations encounter pre existing cultures, practices and power structures (in business, political and bureaucratic spheres) which sometimes become threatened by the introduction of new technological paradigms. This resistance phenomenon could help explaining high failure rates in the deployment of new administrative information systems in organizations, even when they are expected to increase productivity. Resistance is also evident in the protectionist threats against off-shoring practices, a debated issue in the recent presidential elections in the USA. On these grounds, it is key to ask ourselves which are the challenges that governments are currently facing. In the first place, governments should contribute to eliminate, or at least diminish, the obstacles the introduction of the ICT paradigm is facing. However, governments can do more than that to help the change. Governments can become ‘early adopters’ of technology, showing their commitment to the introduction of technology and innovation. This is specially beneficial to encourage private investment. In parallel, government has a big role of creating conditions to allow change to happen. Raising awareness and providing education for people are necessary conditions. It is also useful that entrepreneurs are encouraged to grasp new technologies to be able to modify them and produce new ones. Government also has to help creating the necessary flexibility in the public sector to allow change and innovation. An especially critical aspect in the regulation agenda is the telecommunications market. From a government perspective, the coming years should be faced in a mood of serene optimism. A combination of alertness to be able to generate quick responses to opportunities together with a hard work disposition to be able to take the necessary actions to fully realize projects while overcoming the many obstacles that may appear. Digital technologies have transformed the spatial and temporal organization of social life, creating new forms of action and interaction, new kinds of social relationship and new ways of relating to others and to oneself. The new forms of social interaction allowed by Internet oblige us to reconsider the meaning of concepts as community or identity. The big impact of Internet on the expression and perception of social identities is relatively clear: it spans cultural spheres and geographical boundaries and allows communication from many to many. The real difference between the Internet and all preceding media forms is the role it gives to people: millions connected in many to many relationships and interactions. In Internet, common space is a direct result of synergy and connectivity. One of the most important factors for the development of collective identity is and has been communication. If we understand the concept identity not as a given reality but as a work in progress, we will appreciate the important role of communication as the cement of its building process. There are two types of identity building which are relevant here: individual identity understood as the sense of oneself as an individual endowed with certain characteristics and potentialities, and collective identity, understood as a sense of oneself as a member of a social group. It is a sense of belonging, a sense of being part of a collectivity. Both the sense of oneself and the sense of belonging are shaped by the values beliefs and forms of behaving transmitted from the past, but also highly influenced by symbolic materials transmitted by media. In this sense, some authors refer to media as substitutes of tradition. Giddens (1991) tries to understand the persistence of national identities and propose to be considered by analyzing how citizenship is created and recreated in local situations in the context of the everyday uses and production of culture. During many years, Television has taken the place of vernacular literatures in the construction of a common imaginary and complicity. My principal concern in this chapter is that while traditional media, in special television, play an enormous role in the construction of collective identity, Internet influences the construction of individual identity. The difference resides in the fact that the use of television in the construction identity is vertical, from one to many and opposite, the use of Internet in this process of self formation depends of the will of each individual. It is a horizontal use, from many to many. My point of view is that the process of self formation as individuals and as collectivities becomes increasingly dependent on access to mediated forms of communication. How do Information Technologies, and specifically Internet, affect individuals and communities? What constitutes a community in the world of electronic mediation? What are the essential ingredients? Who are the new mediating forces? As professor Cole writes in the introduction of his last version of the World Internet Project1, a lot of academic studies have examined the impact of television on viewers’ lives, but researchers now realize that we missed a golden opportunity by not looking at individuals and their behavior prior to their acquisition of television sets and going back to the same people year after year to see how exposure to the medium changed them and at the same time, I would add, society. In our research in Catalonia we assume that network society is not just the result of the impact of information technologies on social structures, but a new social form using communication as one of the central factors defining it, and becoming the emblematic figure of our current society. It is because of this that the study of the use of the communications media is essential to understand the transformation of social life and the creation of new forms of exercising power disassociated from the fact of sharing a common space. The Network Society From Knowledge to Policy umass.edu/digitalcenter/research/pdfs/JF_NetworkSociety.pdf The world economic system of regional development strategies and clustering of urban regions according to ‘globalists’; the development of a modern ‘world city system’ has provided the essential infrastructure for these profound changes transcending national institutional structures, economies and politics. Urban theorists John Friedmann and Saskia Sassen, have shared the view that a single world economic system is overtaking the traditional economic role and powers of nation–states. They have identified the city as the new dominant spatial scale replacing countries as central nodes in the world economy. Friedmann’s 1986 ‘World City’ hypothesis cast cities as the major power behind a new spatial organisation of the international division of labour, while for Sassen writing in 1991, ‘key structures of the world economy integral to contemporary globalisation’ are now located in ‘Global Cities’. As Peter Taylor’s empirical World City Network research has demonstrated, the organisational networks of firms now able to conduct business on a global scale due to the informational and communications technologies (ICTs) revolution, have created a world–wide network of global cities. Dominant contemporary world economic functions, ‘advanced producer services’—banking, financial and professional services etc—create the connections in this network because service firms are clustered within global cities on a world–wide scale. It is the process of world dispersal and integration of these services (in global city nodes) that has created the new strategic role of global cities that gives them economic independence from nation states. Importantly, the detachment of economic exchanges from the traditional national scale of governance is crucially linked to changes in production and trade which are increasingly associated with knowledge. Advanced producer service firms produce and trade specialised knowledge that is vested in human capital. This is most apparent in wholesale financial services where fungible trade such as securities and futures is virtual, crossing nation state borders almost invisibly. But production of tangible products is increasingly knowledge–intensive too. Advanced manufacturing and primary production require financing, r&d , innovation, information management, intellectual property, advertising, marketing, supply and value chains, logistics management, etc. Adding value in competitive markets that are increasingly global everywhere, means capitalizing on knowledge. Production of all kinds is thus increasingly linked into a knowledge–based economy that is operating on a global scale. are increasingly highly networked and dependent on advanced knowledge–intensive services that are also traded globally. Transcontinental flows of material and intangible knowledge–based goods, labour and services, all point to the diminishing significance of territorial borders. The dynamic architecture of the knowledge–based economy therefore marks a transition in spatial relations in which the network connectivity of global cities is ever more crucial, but at the same time, the nodal scale of international exchanges is changing. A new sub– national scale of economic agency, identified by Hall and Pain in their 2006 European polynet study, is emerging in key world locations as flows in knowledge–intensive networks, concentrated in global cities, seep out creating a global mega–city region as nation states world wide open up to direct foreign competition and embrace the post–industrial global economy, conduct knowledge–based transactions and trade products over any distance virtually instantaneously, can be said to have effectively dismantled the traditional world map of national boundaries that has historically marked the jurisdictional scale of states. City–Regions and economic development metropolis.org/sites/default/files/publications/2008/cityregions_complete_0.pdf Special Economic Zones and science-based industry parks. Economic development agencies across the U.S. and around the world have devised policy strategies to stimulate the rapid development of regional innovation clusters. Governments are investing in universities, public-private research partnerships and early-stage capital funds for entrepreneurs. Innovation America President Richard Bendis describes the conceptual shift of the past decade as going from “technology-based development” toward “innovation-based economic development.” Governments are developing comprehensive strategies to nurture new concentrations of growth industries. No longer is regional economic development merely a competition among states for corporate investment on the basis of tax breaks and subsidized land and labor. It requires an entire ecosystem in which high densities of talented people — researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors — collaborate to develop and launch new products and companies. Science Park, research and manufacturing functions are tightly linked, an entire industry chain is present within the cluster to manufacture and commercialize the technologies emerging from the laboratories. U.S. regions are rising to the challenge, focusing on Regional Innovation Cluster initiatives. U.S. regional economies face mounting global competitive challenges. They also compete against national and regional governments that are executing comprehensive strategies that seek to create innovation clusters in many of the same important, emerging industries. National and regional governments in Europe, Asia, and Latin America are backing up these strategies with heavy investment in universities, public-private research collaborations, workforce training, early-stage capital funds, and modern science parks. National and regional governments also can offer investors financial incentives that state governments cannot, such as exemption from all corporate taxes. Ginger Lew of the White House National Economic Council agreed that state and regional efforts have been “occurring on an ad-hoc basis without a formal U.S. policy.” 27 The federal government has become far more engaged in the past few years. Concerns that the U.S. is ceding global leadership in technology and innovation competitiveness in the wake of the National Academies’ Gathering Storm report have prompted Congress to address clusters in legislation such as the America COMPETES Act.28 Cluster building took on greater urgency in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and deep recession that followed. The departments of Energy, Commerce, Defense, Agriculture, Labor, and Education now all have programs devoted to regional innovation clusters. Congress allocated substantial financial support for clusters such as advanced batteries through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and the Obama Administration’s budget for fiscal year 2011 included more than $300 million in new funding for federal agencies to assist regional innovation cluster initiatives. The Administration also developed a strategy to coordinate programs of various federal agencies to support “holistic, integrated solutions to building regional economies,” according to Ms. Lew of the National Economic Council. The Small Business Administration is supporting efforts to develop robotics clusters in Michigan, Virginia, and Hawai’i with the help of state agencies and the Department of Defense. The Energy Innovation Hubs program, also led by the DOE, provides funds for multidisciplinary teams to deploy new clean-energy technologies at scale. Clusters and Regional Initiatives: Rising to the Challenge: U.S. Innovation Policy for the Global Economy ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK100322/ Reif briefs Obama in White House forum on the innovation economy newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/reif-briefs-obama-innovation-economy-1028 Georgia Tech launches new robotics institute rdmag/news/2013/11/georgia-tech-launches-new-robotics-institute Capitol Hill event welcomes revised robotics roadmap robotsindc/2013/03/21/capitol-hill-event-welcomes-revised-robotics-roadmap/ Rethink Robotics invented a $22,000 humanoid robot that competes with low-wage workers technologyreview/news/509296/small-factories-give-baxter-the-robot-a-cautious-once-over/ Advanced Manufacturing Will Drive U.S. Economic Engine areadevelopment/EconomicsGovernmentPolicy/Summer2012/Advanced-Manufacturing-drives-USA-economic-engine-255422.shtml As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up nytimes/2014/12/16/upshot/as-robots-grow-smarter-american-workers-struggle-to-keep-up.html Knowledge and its economic counterpart – intellectual capital – is the key economic and development resource of the new 21st century economy. Land is the key resource in an economy where agriculture is a prevailing economic activity. In an industrial economy, natural resources such as coal, iron ore, work force, represent main resources. The knowledge economy is an economy where knowledge represents the key resource, an economy where production and exploitation of knowledge has become the predominant factor in production of wealth. It is not simply about expanding the boundaries of knowledge; it is about more efficient use and exploitation of any and all aspects of knowledge. Development of information and telecommunication technologies at the end of the twentieth century resulted in increased participation of information and knowledge, both in production technologies and in products, too. Increased participation of knowledge in the new value represents the main characteristic of transition from the industrial age into the new age, into the knowledge economy. Transition to a knowledge - based system may make market failure systemic; knowledge - based economy is so fundamentally different from the resource - based system of the last century that conventional economic understanding must be re- examined. NEW ECONOMY – KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY economicsandlaw.org/fajlovi/Vol4/10.%20Krmpot%20Vera%20-%20New%20Economy%20-%20Knowledge%20Economy.pdf The digital revolution is opening up a great divide between a skilled and wealthy few and the rest of society. Economists hailed a new age of globalization even as geopolitical tensions rose. Then, as now, political systems struggled to accommodate the demands of growing numbers of dissatisfied workers. Some economists are offering radical thoughts on the job destroying power of this new technological wave. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, of Oxford University, recently analyzed over 700 different occupations to see how easily they could be computerized, and concluded that 47% of employment in America is at high risk of being automated a way over the next decade or two. Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee ask whether human workers will be able to up grade their skills fast enough to justify their continued employment. Other authors think that capitalism itself may be under threat The Third Great Wave - Economist economist/sites/default/files/20141004_world_economy.pdf Already our Asian rivals are competing not just in low-skilled manufacturing, but in high-tech products and services. Once, we worried about a global arms race. The challenge this century is a global skills race. Britain has advocated the creation of a high-skilled, high-waged economy by upgrading the education and skills of its workforce. The creation of world-class skills is assumed to be a route to economic prosperity, reduced income inequalities and social cohesion. 1 Such policy prescriptions rest on the idea of a knowledge economy where innovative ideas and technical expertise hold the key to the new global competitive challenge. While Britain’s workforce can no longer rely on low skilled manufacturing jobs to provide a living wage, as these jobs migrate to low-cost economies in Eastern Europe and Asia, it is commonly argued that Britain is well placed to become a ‘magnet’ economy, supplying the global economy with high skilled, high waged workers. But the recent success of China and India in moving into the production of high value-added, high-technology products has caused political leaders and their advisors to re-evaluate the global economic challenge. The OECD recently acknowledged that emerging economies including China and India were moving up the value chain to compete with Western companies for high-tech products and R&D investment. The challenge is to outsmart other national economies - whether established or emerging - in the ‘knowledge wars’ of the future. Despite much talk about globalisation and the knowledge economy, there is a surprising lack of recent empirical research into the skills strategies of transnational companies (TNCs) or the skill formation strategies of emerging nations, including China and India. The project aimed to locate Western debates about the global knowledge economy in a comparative context. Do policy-makers in emerging economies such as China and India understand their role in the global economy in the same way as commentators in the West? Rosecrance (1999), for example, has suggested that the world is divided between ‘head’ nations such as Britain and the United States, and ‘body’ nations such as China that offer a new productive relationship to the benefit of each nation. 5 This project offers an initial assessment of whether the global knowledge-based economy is likely to meet the political aspirations of national governments and the social and economic aspirations of students and workers in Western countries, especially Britain. A shift towards the global alignment of business processes and the international benchmarking of quality standards, facilitated by new technologies. The twentieth century brought mechanical Taylorism, characterised by the Fordist production line, where the knowledge of craft workers was captured, codified and re-engineered in the shape of the moving assembly line by management, the twenty-first century is the age of digital Taylorism. This involves translating knowledge work into working knowledge through the extraction, codification and digitalisation of knowledge into software prescripts and packages that can be transmitted and manipulated by others regardless of location. The distinction between conception and execution in a period of mechanical Taylorism transformed the relationship between ‘working’ and ‘middle’ class occupations, digital Taylorism takes the form of a power struggle within the middle classes, as these processes depend on reducing the discretion of professional employees. Digital Taylorism does not eliminate the importance of employee motivation or the need for customer-facing skills. Standardisation required to achieve mass customisation still needs customers to feel that they are receiving a personalised service. This may contribute to a continuing demand for university graduates. These findings challenge the policy mantra of a high-skills, high-wage economy. While the skills of the workforce remain important, they are not a source of decisive competitive advantage. Many countries, including China and India, are adopting the same tactics. It is how the capabilities of the workforce are combined in innovative and productive ways that holds the key. High-skilled workers in high-cost countries will have to contend with the price advantage of university graduates in developing economies. • There is also little evidence to support the claim that the value of human capital (skills, knowledge, etc.) will continue to rise even as leading transnational companies restructure their global operations to deliver innovative ideas at the lowest cost. This approach fails to understand how emerging economies, including China and India, are leap-frogging decades of technological development in the West to compete for high-skilled, high-value work, including research and development. In the early decades of the twenty-first century the rise of the high-skill, low-wage workforce may become a feature of the developed as well as the developing economies. winner-takes-all’ markets, people with similar qualifications in the same occupations, organisations and countries are experiencing increasing polarisation in their career prospects, intensifying the positional competition within the middle classes. Education, globalisation and the knowledge economy tlrp.org/pub/documents/globalisationcomm.pdf This report introduces a set of tools and techniques we call Atomtechnologies, which includes nanoparticles, nano biotechnology, nanofabrication and molecular manufacture. It also describes the coming convergence of biotechnology, information technologies, and cognitive sciences with nano-scale manipulation of matter as the unifying force. The key technologies of the past half-century—transistors, semiconductors, and genetic engineering — have all been about down— reducing size, materials and costs while increasing power. We are about to take a much bigger step down. Our capacity to manipulate matter is moving from genes to atoms. While civil society and governments focus on genetic modification, an impressive array of industrial enterprises is targeting a scientific revolution that could modify matter and transform every aspect of work and life. FROM GENOMES TO ATOMS: The Big Down: Atomtech: Technologies Converging at the Nano-scale etcgroup.org/sites/etcgroup.org/files/thebigdown.pdf Convergence of knowledge and technology for the benefit of society (CKTS) is the core opportunity for progress in the 21st century. It is defined in this study as the escalating and transformative interaction among seemingly distinct scientific disciplines, technologies, to achieve synergism, and integration. Convergence is as essential to our future knowledge society as engines were to the industrial revolution. CKTS allows society to create new competencies, technologies, and knowledge on this basis. Based on these principles, this report suggests solutions for key societal challenges in the next decade, including: (a) accelerating progress in foundational emerging technologies and creating new industries and jobs at their frontiers and interfaces in the economic, human-scale, Earth-scale, and societal scale platforms; (b) increasing creativity, innovation, and economic productivity through convergence, including developing a universal domain of information exchange and interaction; and (c) improving lifelong wellness and human potential, including advancing a cognitive society, achieving individualized and integrated healthcare and education. CKTS builds on previous stages of convergence, followed by convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information, and cognitive (NBIC) technologies CONVERGENCE OF KNOWLEDGE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY: Beyond Convergence of Nano-Bio-Info-Cognitive Technologies wtec.org/NBIC2/Docs/FinalReport/Pdf-secured/NBIC2-FinalReport-WEB.pdf The current financial crisis is not an accidental event in the financial system. It is a historically recurrent phenomenon endogenous to the market system. It results from the way technological revolutions are assimilated. Such major collapses signal the need for a structural shift in the forces guiding growth and innovation from financial to production capital and to the return of an active state. If history is a guide, a global golden age may lie ahead All bubbles are about greed and he rd behavior regulation tries to avoid their worst excesses, but some bubbles are also about the installation of technological revolutions and making overall paradigm shifts. The crash of 1929 and the twin collapses of 2000 and 2007-8 are of this type. Recovery from the consequences of those bubbles requires major institutional innovation to enable the real economy to flourish. The basis for making those statements is the evidence of regular historical patterns of diffusion and assimilation of technological revolutions in the economy and society. There have been five technological revolutions in 240 years: the first was the ‘Industrial Revolution’ from 1771, with the introduction of machinery THE ADVANCE OF TECHNOLOGY AND MAJOR BUBBLE COLLAPSES: HISTORICAL REGULARITI ES AND LESSONS FOR TODAY carlotaperez.org/downloads/media/PEREZTechnologyandbubblesforEngelsbergseminar.pdf Eurasian Integration as a Response to Neo-Liberal Globalisation valdaiclub/russia_and_the_world/66605.html BLOC HEADS: Builders of the New World Order (Full Length) https://youtube/watch?v=ePpH5zI1EAo
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 23:23:07 +0000
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