I see in the Wall Street Journal that Europe plans to build 50 new coal-fired power plants (in Italy, Germany, Belgium) over the next five years. Despite strong objections from the population, coal remains cheaper and easier than oil, and except in France, nuclear faces even mroe objections and obstacles. What would you call this - back-hopping?

Tim Graettinger, thanks for the reference to Maslov. I had not thought of that before, but you may be right. It would be interesting to try and create a hierarchy of needs FOR TECHNOLOGY.

Do you find relation of technology with Nietzsche’s concept on will-to-power? Technology is a will of another.Perhaps not human. Nietzche’s prose on “the new, the nameless, the hard-to-understand, we newborns of a yet untried future…”, is very representative now.

A great read as usual, Kevin. Where do you think Kuznets curves, especially environmental ones, as Conor Neu above is hinting at, fit into all this? I suppose what I have in mind is that you may well be right about leapfrogging, but that with the right sort of assistance from countries on the leading edge of innovation and adoption of technology, it might be possible for the up and coming countries to, if not leapfrog, at least dramatically increase their rate of change. That is, it may well be that the U.S, had to go through a century-long polluting period before it was rich enough to be able to worry about deliberately reducing pollution, but do China and India have to take the same length of time? Is it necessary that they make all of our mistakes, or can we at least help them make new ones?

Feels like there’s a bit of relationship to Maslov’s hierarchy of needs in psychology - first, take care of the physiological needs (infrastructure, electricity, …), move on to safety/security, and on up the scale. It’s not a perfect analogy, but there appears to be an implied hierarchy and a notion of “must-have” precedents. And the tie-in to psychology may not just be a loose analogy when you think about people’s needs driving technology. A cell phone might be a “want”, but not a “need” if you don’t have clean water to drink.

Is the world wide web leapfrogging libraries and reference books?

Kevin —

I agree with most of your positions (and others, in other essays); in this case, I’m reminded of something I heard about first at the WSIS in 2005, regarding cell phones, fishermen off the coast of Kerala, India, prices, and fish waste. The best reference I can easily find (http://www.youcanhearmenow.com/?p=91) concurs with what I heard presented — that once cell phones were available to the fishermen, they were able to self-regulate (on a daily basis) the fish-selling in local fish markets, by going to the markets that were not oversupplied with [specific types of] fish.

In the presentation I saw in the WSIS presentation in Tunis, the “fish waste” (the day’s catch which was shoved overboard, because it wasn’t selling) went to flatline, once cell phones allowed rational market validation (because the fishermen were cooperating and not accidentally converging on markets).

It was an instance of leapfrogging for sanity — that is, a tool that fit a specific need (in this case, “where is there a market?”), and so validated and encouraged the application of a technology.

In many contexts, especially in the developing world, human-power will and can outdistance technology-power, because the cost of time (human power) is less than the costs of technology — infrastructure development, technical expertise, etc.

Leapfrogging happens, I suspect, only when a devalued human-labor cost (cheap time) is outweighed by technology costs (expensive expertise and infrastructure). We in the north/west often forget about how cheap human time is, in developing countries: a five-hour round-trip walk to a nearby city to recharge the cellphone isn’t outrageous, in rural Kenya. In urban America, it would be ridiculous.

So leapfrog technologies must therefore be exceedingly advantageous, to “take” in the developing world.

For the fishermen of Kerala, it was worth the cost to have a cellphone. For the average Joe in rural Kenya, renting an occasional call from a neighbor’s cellphone business makes sense, in terms of cost and value, but owning the phone, and paying the costs, has few advantages, given the necessity of that five-hour walk to recharge the phone.

Marc,

I haven’t seen McAfee’s work, but I’ll be sure to track it down. Thanks.

Kent,

Yes, no technology is an island, or an orphan. Every technology is co-dependent on others.

Kevin, your quoted someone a while back as saying “Technology is everything invented after we were born”. Of course, it does feel that way, but it is not at all true. Technology is a vast accretion of learnings. I recently read “A History of Technology, from earliest times to 1900” http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Technology-Earliest-D/dp/0486274721 It is a dense one volume summary of a 5 volume work done in the mid twentieth century. It really helped me understand how older technologies underpin newer ones. I worked in “hi tech” for 33 years, and I completely took for granted a vast number of older technologies that made our product design, manufacturing, and distribution possible. And as you mention in your post, people without water or electricity will have scant need for (as well as little disposable income for) computers or mp3 players. Satellite TV seems to be another leapfrog. I suspect GPS will leapfrog older means of navigation on the coasts and inlands of less developed countries. But in general I agree that leapfrogging is much rarer that the cell example might lead us to believe. The good news is that it seems that even one leapfrog technology can have a big impact on hastening the implementation of older technology. Cell phones promote communication which will very likely promote transportation. Because my daughter, who lives in the boonies in Tanzania, can e-mail me and ask me to ship things to her, the demand for transportation is increased. Likewise, because an acquaintance of mine can order stock for her “fair trade” store here in Oregon, manufacture and transport of goods in a number of developing countries is increased.

This was a very insightful post. I hope it figures prominently into the heart of your book on what technology wants.

KK, another great post. Another thing that perhaos makes this leapfrogging rarer than one would expect is the so called “10X improvement factor.” Andrew Mc Afee of Harvard describes this as people’s overvaluing incumbent technologies by a factor of 3, and undervaluing new technologies by a factor of 3, meaning that a new technology has to be over 9X better to be adopted.

Stu Card also once told me that there’s rarely been a new technology that hasn’t become adopted by not emulating the technology it is dethroning first.

Neither of these factors holds in places where there is no incumbent, so perhaps that should be part of the analysis as well. How much “leapfrogging” goes on when it is an instance “late blooming”—a new technology coming in without anything previously fulfilling that function?

Thanks for the inciteful posts. Marc Meyer, CEO Blogrovr

This is a much less intelligent comment, but I was at a crummy run down subway station in Brooklyn the other day, and it made me think of how in scifi vision of the future, all the buildings are pristine and shiny and everything is made of metal and looks awesome. But in reality, brick’s always going to be cheaper, and even though the idea of a train cart that runs on an electrified rail is pretty futuristic (when you think about it abstractly… without the hobos) it’s still easier to build the stations using methods that were used a thousand years ago. I guess what I’m saying is, there will always bee an economic need for crappy technology, even if better technology exists. I guess that’s kind of a different concept from leapfrogging in under developed countries, but, still… uh… I think I distracted myself.

Surely the link between poverty reduction/service provision and the diffusion of new technology is surely what is most important about leapfrogging, not the ‘true fact’ of leapfrogging itself. That development of services has a ‘backwards effect’ which can lead to the ‘pushing forward’ of old technology or the filling of gaps in services which would not be filled otherwise. Again, mobile phone technology is my only real example here, but a useful document in this regard is a swedish development agency document called’ mobile phone technology in the philippines: lessons for Africa’ (www.sida.se/shared/jsp/download.jsp?a=33306&f=SIDA38306en_Phillippines+web.pdf -). I am also thinking here of the experiences of mobile expansion in the Pacific, particularly PNG, where the recent introduction of mobile telephony competition is expected to have a significant impact on GDP. This is in a country where the electricity infrastructure is very limited, and where the geography of the place means that land-lines will probably never follow. The introduction od decent, affrodable telecom services is having a huge impact on the mainly rural based population there - meaning that ‘workarounds’ can be implemented to overcome obstacles old technology simply cannot overcome. For example, my friends there tell me about farmers being able to ring ahead to markets a days walk away and check what is needed, so they only take what they can sell. The introduction of mobile services there also has huge potential for banking and therein other services, in a country where banks are at least a days walk from over half the population. This has massive implications for things like payment (and thus retention) of teachers, as they generally get robbed whilst walking to pick up their pay. It could also have an impact on the potential of remittances from family members working overseas to actually make it back into rural areas, rather than getting stuck in the larger cities as relatives must go there to access the cash. Surely the gaps the technology manages to fill in people’s everyday lives influences its spread, not its typology alone - although of course some types of technology (cheap ones suited to existing technologies or lack thereof )- fill gaps easier.

Alternative Energy will be a truly interesting leapfrog technology to monitor. Power is an old and basic technology. Many of the alternative energy technologies leapfrog not only environmental standards, but also locality issues. Having solar panels on top of houses removes the necessity for power wires to bring power from the coal power plant.

In the end, I think we will need to monitor alternative energy technologies individually, as Wind power could easily leapfrog in one country, while Solar could in another. Here’s to hoping they all take off.