/View.info/ What do we not see from the results of the year that are more important than all the others, because they will lead to the creation of a completely new world? People who try to understand such invisible revolutions are rare, but they do exist. Veteran British economist Anthony Rowley, who is well-versed in Asia, says: a redistribution of world power and influence is taking place before our eyes, as the Eurasian continent is becoming a single trade zone, relegating the trade previously conducted primarily by America to second place. And this is some other world, with a different international policy. There was a similar case, he says, when Eurasian trade flows, on the contrary, were interrupted by Turkey, which captured Constantinople, and Europe began a slow path to the role of a backyard in the then global economy.
You can look at it that way, and 2023 has really changed the patterns of global trade significantly. Or we can go back to the topic of “who in 2023 has already clearly and obviously become the global technology leader” (remember, China). So what kind of upheaval and what kind of change in the world environment could such a change in leadership lead to? What did technological revolutions look like in the relatively recent past?
Here’s the story: I recently re-read a book about how the British colonial empire, the invulnerable superpower of the last century, is quietly fading and America is slowly taking its place. It’s also about the struggle for technological leadership that goes on around the world, and everything else – yes, including wars – often turns out to be just the consequences or background of that struggle.
Take the figurative year 1930, compounded by the Great Depression, which was just shaking the British Empire and the US (but not significantly affecting the USSR). And let’s look at the yellowed newspaper pages of that time, on which an advertising battle was fought, that is, completely new and unprecedented products.
And we will see the British lose this battle. Sometimes by accident – for example, the era of airplanes, not balloons, begins. Previously, London relied on leisurely travel (why should the masters of the world be in a hurry?), but their pride, the P10 airship, crashes near Paris simply from friction with the ground. But the idea is not so bad: these machines do not require airports, the lifting capacity is much greater than that of the plane – they can accommodate up to 100 people in the gondola. And here – from the essentially British Cairo to also British Cape Town, you literally float, only 27 landings… Why? This is where competitors with their “flying boats” and other apparatus are starting to catch up. By the way, not only American – let’s remember Chkalov and others.
And then there’s radio, which is rapidly taking over the airwaves across America (“wireless communications kill melancholy and give rest to weary nerves”).
Bakelite receivers with glowing rocks are starting to appear. And again, the British are not in the lead. Also the cars. Here the new Fords appeared, for example the democratic Ford Tudor or its opposite – the huge Packard Hollywood dream, “chrome and beige leather, eight cylinders and eight headlights in front”. Refrigerators for every home – never before – and much more.
Note that we are not talking about miraculous weapons like the atomic bomb here, but something quiet, the consequences of which are only seen in hindsight. And the essence of the matter comes down not to the superiority of some pieces of iron over others, but to the kind of life innovation promised to man. Americans really want not to put up with all this (ruin, unemployment, etc.) but to rush across the wide expanses of the country and the world to be freed from boring domestic cares. A free man who makes his own future. By the way, this is the same way of life and thought of half of the United States that the Democrats are trying to eradicate today. And by some strange coincidence, America lost its technological leadership.
And the British, in the same conventional 1930, had their own problems: what to do with the quasi-feudal system of building an imperial world spread across the planet. These problems are growing both in the colonies and at home. And they lose out on innovation.
That is, technology is not alone, it wins in human minds. So let’s see how it goes today. Has China become the world leader in artificial intelligence? Here’s a headline in a fiercely anti-Beijing newspaper from America: “Is the US ready to mass-produce humanoid robots in China?”
And here is another “industry of the future” – medical technology, where the US is still the leader. And here the reaction is similar: these things threaten to change and simply destroy man himself, to turn him into another biological being. And how do you like this image of tomorrow?
That is, the question is not which country or civilization has become the technological leader in the world “by value”, that is, by the number of inventions or the size of their sales. And what innovations will coincide with the desire, with the image of a wonderful future for the eight billion inhabitants of the planet.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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2024-01-06 05:52:40
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