Post-Industrial Society in the Global Village

#globality

To understand life in the Global Village, think about how our nomadic ancestors lived:

Hunter-gatherers lived in a society in which most or all their needs were obtained by foraging for wild foods. Until about 12,000 to 11,000 years ago, when agriculture and animal domestication emerged in southwest Asia and in Mesoamerica, all peoples were hunter-gatherers. Their "villages"  were mobile and dependent on the availability of indigenous resources. When they exhausted those resources, they moved on.

Hunter-gatherers harnessed the use of fire, developed intricate knowledge of plant life and refined technology for hunting and domestic purposes as they spread from Africa to Asia, Europe and beyond.

 Some were able to find places of abundance where they could settle in small villages close to those resources. Over time, they became less dependent on foraging. Instead, they bred animals and cultivated wild plants for food. That knowledge was a game changer. It enabled the small villages to grow and for residents to specialize in tasks such as ranching and farming. 

Fast-forward a few thousand years, and we find a highly specialized culture where ranching and farming have become an industry. This industry was supported by automated machinery produced in factories that employed hundreds of workers. The villages have evolved into large cities of workers who are sustained by the industries they serve. At first, most factories were embedded in residential areas. Then the noise and pollution produced by those factories induced the residents to separate the factories from the residential areas. Thus was born the Industrial Park. 

Initially, the Industrial Park was a short commute from home. However, the increased demand for homes close to the Industrial Park drove prices up and forced the average worker to move further and further away from their job location. The short commute became a longer commute. With more people commuting came the need to build more and better roads. Two-lane highways evolved into four and even six lanes. The improved highways encouraged more workers to "move to the country" for cheaper housing and better living conditions. Soon this whole process began to reflect the industrial mentality that launched it. That opened the door to data-controlled automated processes. Soon every aspect of life was subject to these processes. There were "work time" processes, "family time" processes, and for many "wartime" processes. Daily living became more complex than the average person could handle without the support of machines. From automobiles to commuter trains, from home appliances to medical equipment, from work machinery to entertainment; every aspect of life required machine assistance.

Machines must be programmed to perform the function required. In the simplest terms, programming meant designing processes to guide the machine. Process design required data input. The engineer or designer used data to tell the machines what users expected them to do. So an automobile must go forward or backward under its own power. A wash machine must use water and soap to wash clothes. A rifle must propel lead bullets at a target. Beyond the basic function the designer needed to know "how fast" the auto should go; "how much water" the wash machine required and "how far" the lead bullet must propel. The engineer/designer used a four-step process comparable to the hunting/gathering process of our ancestors.

1) Gather data

2) Process the data using previous data as reference

3) Take action based off the refined data

4) Receive feedback data, learn from the result, and store it all in memory.

Patterns not only point out what works vs. what doesn’t work, strengths vs. weaknesses, and trends vs. anomalies, but it helps people categorize information so it’s easy to remember for future use.

 

As Albert Einstein once said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” The only way someone is going to change is by being exposed to a negative pattern holding them back or see a better pattern to get ahead. The last step is implementation through will power and action. 

 

In the Industrial Park, the engineer/designer provided that will power and action.

In the Global Village, technology  replicates the intelligence of the engineer/designer and develops it into a digital commodity sold on the open market.  But it must still be harnessed using the same model as our primitive ancestors.  Utilizing advancements in hardware, software, and data technology is on the verge of manufacturing intelligence. The autonomous economy is the growth engine in the Global Village.

 

The Internet of Things (IoT):

 There are really two categories of data: public data and private data. The Internet is the largest warehouse of public data and is unique because it’s an ever-increasing resource. Private data is mostly concentrated on private servers, especially in Clouds, and contains sensitive information that people either don’t want to freely share or don’t want seen. It shouldn’t really be surprising anymore that many of the largest companies in the world own the most data, like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Baidu. 

The Global Village is the master host of all applications that Residents use daily. Data metrics are gathered passively as Residents  go about their daily life. In the Industrial Park, real-time data was hard to come by, but  thanks to major innovations in sensor and actuator technology, that is not the case in the Global Village. All types of sensor activity is possible, such as sensors that measure temperature, location, speed, acceleration, depth, pressure, blood chemistry, air quality, color, photo-scanning, voice scanning, biometrics, electric, and magnetic force. Normally, humans are required to take such measurements, but that is quickly changing due to the availability of  accurate sensors and actuators. They’re not only placed in the environment, but are embedded in  machines, robots, and even worn by humans. This river of real-time information flows constantly. The only way that autonomous action is effective is if it can respond quickly with confident judgments. The ability to monitor intricate details in real-time about every aspect of life in the Village is transformational on many levels. Essentially, everything, both physical to non-physical, is being brought online as data into an interconnected web, hence the name, the Internet of Things. It’s the human senses in digital form. Or, as Marshall McLuhan might say, the senses of every Resident in the Global Village are now extended to every nook and cranny of the entire Village.

 

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