George Friedman: Geopolitics and Technology (2019 WORLD.MINDS Annual Symposium)

[Music] what is geopolitics it is the pattern of power the rising and falling of nations and the elements that make it happen one element of course is military one element is economic one element is political and one crucial element is technology we'd you been talking about today power creates technology power utilizes technology and power is destroyed by technology so one of the things you have to talk about when you talk about geopolitics is the rise and falls technology in 1972 I was a graduate student in Cornell and walked into the bookstore and there was a youlet packard calculator selling for three hundred dollars which for a graduate student at any one at that time was staggering and that contained a microchip and they said that's really very important and I said yeah right because I could not imagine the rise of this technology I could also not imagine the fall of Kodak the filmmaker who wouldn't be able to make film any longer because there was a microchip I wasn't able to imagine the end of newspapers which were seeing slow here there's so much I couldn't imagine I couldn't imagine that any of the things that I'd grown up with that were so solid so permanent so eternal would go away and yet if I had done at that time what I was learning to do in philosophy and jerry' politics what I was studying and look at patterns I could see it but I didn't if you go back and we can't go away back to electricity what electricity do it made possible for cities to exist as industrial centers without electricity without electric lights who couldn't work at night you could utilize that factory only during a day and that poorly electricity made the Industrial Revolution possible and when electricity was introduced it was an extraordinary thing and no one could imagine all the other things that would do some of which you saw today in biology it was unimaginable it was what I would call a core technology a core technology is one that branches and creates and transforms many times over so that who would have imagined that you could drop something into someone's stomach measure its acidity or whatever it was using a form of electricity these things were unimaginable which is one of the deep failures of human beings the deep failure human beings is to fail to understand that that which is here now will not be here later but something else will be here so when we think about what electricity did it has transformed the night the first thing it did is made it possible to have symphonies played on a cold night having the railroad that was already invented bring you to the city and you go London and listen to Mozart the way in which technology wove itself together was extraordinary you could also develop tools of war you would create countries that were enormous ly powerful you could change the world with that core technology and everything is not a core technology but electricity was and it was invented long before Ben Franklin was fooling around with it but it became an installed tool in the 1880s in the 1880s you began to have city lighting there was not gas an amazing thing and this was everything you should invest in and it gave you huge amounts of leisure time and also work time and it was a wonderful thing that you saw in front of you and by 1933 it was just one of those things 1930 was about the time when all euro-american cities had been electrified almost all and by then it was just a normal part of your life that could never cease being important and yet it wasn't important it was commonplace it was natural it was what you had after a generation it's who you forget what you didn't have take a look at the automobile in 2015 in 1950 and sorry Henry Ford opened his Factory what Henry Ford did was not invent the car but invent a car that you could afford he also invented invented something else very important in the United States the dealership Henry Ford didn't say I'm gonna go sell house the house of a car I'm gonna have a dealer and he's gonna fix the car because this thing is gonna break and he invented the entire cycle of an automobile and those things are extraordinary and the first people who had them were groundbreakers transforming the world and it transformed the world because you are now able to live 30 40 miles away from the city from the factory in which you worked the office in which you worked and drive to work traffic Zaman ops you didn't have them yet and by 1965 50 years after it was visited it was a mature business the car had automatic transmission it had air conditioning it had brakes that worked a self-starter you didn't have to crank it it was done and everybody imagined what else we could do with the car because I'd learned from electricity you could do things and there was an idea why don't we have a car that flew this sounds demented now and it was demented then but it didn't sound demented because there was a belief we could push this technology ad infinitum but at the same time we had the aircraft which had began with the internal combustion engine that the car began with ok and we could get to Europe in 12 hours we Americans measure it by getting to Europe I don't know why we measure it by getting to Europe in 12 hours we could fly here what and then a jet came the 707 and we pushed it we had to have the Concorde to get to London in two and a half hours and nobody bought it because the difference is six hours and two and a half hours really wasn't worth the money and we weren't going to buy it see every time you have a core technology you begin by not being able to imagine what it can do and then you think it can imagine you can imagine it transforming everything forever you could change everything from that technology and then that technology becomes normal it becomes amateur when I was growing up the cool thing was the car all the cool guys myself not included but I pretended all the cool guys knew how to fix a car and all the cool cool guys knew had a race one this was in the States you guys may have not done it but we did now it's killed ourselves say - that was cool somebody who would be sitting in front of a computer screen playing a video game would not be cool he would not get dates I assure you I didn't get dates either but I was at least cool so where we were 50 years after the car was invented is that it achieved its end it had come to naught that it wouldn't be useful for a long long time not that you would be buying them not that they wouldn't matter not that you wouldn't use electricity no no you all would be there but the tremendous changes the society that is wrought had taken place there are many other things that would happen but they had changed the automobile changed the landscape of our cities the landscape of our countries particularly in the United States it made in this vast country it possible to go anywhere and that was done and it was good and then it didn't matter so 1972 I picked up something containing a microchip which I had read something about it was an integrated search circuit I wasn't sure what else it did but it could run a calculator and I said who cares I can still add my fingers their mechanical calculators that I could use why would I buy this because I didn't see what was inherent in that microchip I didn't see an iPhone with a GPS system an iPhone with its own camera by the way I told my wife when the cameras introduced who would want a phone with a camera so I'm not good at this game she still irritates me by taking pictures and number three the ability to take a phone call anywhere you are that came from the microchip our ability to recall data I won't say information data which is a lesser thing on our computers the things that we were able to do and we entered the place with a microchip would be in turtle it would continue transforming our lives forever so the message I am giving you the microchip is 50 years old it was like an automobile in 1965 it was like electricity in 1930 it is not useless many excellent things will derive from it but it will not change the pattern of your lives the way it has you will dream of Conchords now called 5g I still have not clear what 5g does I had a team research and they can't figure out what it does but it's going to be very good which is very much what the McCann cord was or anything else we see the signs of the decline of the radicalism of the microchip when we take a look at the question of productivity growth ever since the early nineteen 22,000 safe sorry wellness productivity worldwide has been declining during the 1990s really to around 2005 it's surged why did a surge it surged because the microchipped culture of technology may things possible when I started my work I used a typewriter I wrote my dissertation on a typewriter do you know how demented that is because you're gonna make mistakes and your professor doesn't want mistakes so you hire somebody it was a woman always in those days and she knew how not to make mistakes but I didn't imagine a place with a spellcheck built in none of these things were how much did it change the way our offices worked how our our car repairs worked how our management of the electrical grid grid except in California how that worked it changed everything they merged together but what was not happening any longer and hasn't happened is the kind of numbers of of growth productivity growth that we've seen before now where are we at this point we're at the point we were about 1930 or about 1965 now if you remember the 1970s or the Great Depression which we all had it was intimately connected to the decline of productivity plus a lot of other things but the kind of productivity was critical because technologies come along in gaps okay people were working in electricity with a fantastic passion leaving the world quite open Henry Ford and Damon Erb ends and everyone else and now they are with the same absolute passion working on microchip based technology something new and extraordinary will be made many new things many extraordinary but the radical improvement in productivity you can only get that with its brand-new just maturing transforming which would mean that well we got a kind of bad decade coming but the truth is this is the cycle when I say geo politics is about patterns there's a pattern built into technology and I vastly oversimplified it so anybody who disagrees with me I would have said what you thought I should say anyway we've vastly oversimplified but there's a pattern to technological growth including the gap and the gap consists of the time in which we cannot imagine this thing ever being anything other than the most fantastic thing the world has ever seen be the auto the the railroad beads we can't imagine but more than that the best minds are all looking for the next big thing but most of our best minds are off trying to push this technology one step further one step further one step further until they get a Concorde so the real question that faces us today is we see the global system shifting and we see it partly cause of technology and what do we see when I talk about that iPhone every component in it was defended by the American Defense Department the camera was invented by the National Reconnaissance Office the cellphone was developed by the US Army as a mode of communication GPS was designed for missiles the microchip was invented by the US government for a submarine-launched ballistic missile that needed a lightweight system and then for the f-14 fire and the internet was invented as we all know by Al Gore and if not Al Gore certainly by DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency so when I talk about technology and I say great power bills take great technology it is also highly vulnerable the powers of with technology whether it's the British steamship or steel rather than bronze sword it doesn't matter technology matters when you say is America losing it the great European wish the fact of the matter is well we're now at the juncture we invented electricity we invented the automobile dealership we invented the microchip now what is the next thing that is coming because the one thing you can be certain of it is coming you will not expect it and will be utterly different than what came before the microchip was not connected to the internal combustion engine the internal combustion engine had nothing to do with electrical generation each ones who were sequentially came and transformed the world and other things to that I to to shorten engine what is the next thing coming who would have thought that Microsoft Bill Gates coming up with the idea of putting an operating system on a disk and selling it to other computer manufacturers are not making hardware was a genius at the time you look like an idiot and this is the problem we face I could not recognize that in my hands in 1972 that ulid Packard was the future that it would change everything and I'm not stupid well sometimes it's stupid but sometimes I'm not I looked at it and I said this is nice so I don't think that Edison imagined what he was going to do with the electrical this AC current I'm not sure what they thought but it doesn't matter because history decides what's true not all the voters not public opinion not even the New York Times this is sinful to say in America none of these do it is the thing that drives power one step further is the thing that bridge nation's power and security and leverage and control and if we look at many of the dimensions of American powers growth it was these things these technologies the battleground in geopolitics therefore is the next technology the old one is gone it's in the hands of the others what comes after this decade long pause that is going to be the next technology here to tell you that I haven't the slightest idea but after it's invented I will tell you I always knew it why that's my job we don't know what it is is the point but this we can be sure of the digital world like all other great inventions will be here it is an integral part of what we do but the great multiples you won't see them the great growth and productivity you've seen there'll be many new things coming I'm sure we saw so many of them but history tells us and this is where it comes into your politics that the power of nations is intimately linked to technology and technology has a ruthless pattern of his own and that is intellectual when a really smart guy who can't get a date says I'm not interested in digital anything anymore this is old and starts to think about the next thing this could be also a woman I'm just an old guy so I think of these terms there's no reason it can't be a woman and I'll just say that my daughter is an intelligence officer in the US Army so don't don't pick on me point I'm making is we don't know what's coming it will be coming if you create the atmosphere for that guy that gal to save the incredible digital has matured the great things are elsewhere now and if you can say that you can make the history but if you're sitting there playing with cars and racing them and trying to fix them well Bill Gates and jobs are sitting there building pcs and Andy groves is building Intel and everything else as that's happening if you're going to be sitting back here bleeding this will never end you've missed it on that incredibly depressing note good night [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: WORLD.MINDS

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Keywords: WORLD.MINDS, Zurich, technology, science, psychology, talks

Id: 4KSAihd958A

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019