ITU Youth Forum, Special Interactive Plenary - Some starting thoughts from Richard Li

6 December 2006, ITU Youth Forum, Hong Kong

• Welcome everyone. I've been greatly looking forward to this session..



• First, let me put up a big "health warning" disclaimer: I have not seen the future, and you will probably get to grips with it sooner than I.



• But having got that very humbling health warning out of the way, let me pose some issues, and then leave our Q&A session to wrestle with the implications in what is likely to be a truly revolutionary few decades ahead.



• Back in the late 1960s a guy called Thomas Kuhn wrote a now-famous book called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Going back through the centuries he tracked how again and again, scientific revolutionaries from Galileo to Newton to Einstein were resisted and rejected by people around them engaged in what he calls "normal science". Many had long died before the truth of their discoveries was accepted, and the implications taken on board.



• For all of you here today, most of you I think in your early 20s, the truly fundamental nature of the computer-based revolution, and the internet revolution based on it, may be hard to grasp: all of your conscious lives, you have been able to take the internet as a given, and so probably underestimate the truly revolutionary nature of its arrival, and how barely its implications have worked their way through our societies.



• It was only in 1990 - just 16 years ago - that ARPANET - the modest computer network set up between a handful of US universities and research departments - became the internet.



• In 1986, when many of you were in daipers, a journalist then covering the ITU would have had to sit at a telex machine punching out his report on a long strip of paper tape before feeding the tape manually back into the telex for transmission. Back in their offices, many would type their news reports on three-ply paper for manual editing by subeditors and editors. Computer terminals cost US$10,000 a time - no exaggeration - and mobile phones were not even a glint in anyone's eye.



• Life has been totally changed. While the technology is sweeping us forward, the social and psychological institutions that anchor our lives in societies around the world are struggling to keep up and to cope with the consequences.



• Computers that have greatly speeded our work efficiency are accused of damaging our literacy.



• An internet that has given us vastly enhanced access to information around the world has also helped criminal gangs to operate more effectively, and given youngsters access to pornography and worse that is creating anxieties in many societies around the world.



• School teachers are reporting that rising numbers of five-year-olds are starting school without basic language and talking skills: with much of their learning coming from computer screens, they have lacked the to-and-fro with parents that apparently underpins most of our early language learning.



• Social workers are reporting rising numbers of teenagers that lack the confidence or capability to interact with other people face to face because they have become so reliant on communicating across the ether.



• Governments that until a decade ago had effective control over their own populations are learning that the globally anarchic structure of the internet is threatening their institutions.



• This is generating a fundamental clash between those who relish the idea of a "bottom up, virally grown and innovative internet" and those concerned about command, control, and social stability.



• And when you see some of the numbers, you can perhaps understand why: Chinese companies are today making 400 million mobile phones a year; we now have 2.5 billion people with mobile subscriptions around the world, with 40 million being added every month; even in Africa, which originally lagged many other parts of the world, mobile phone ownership has risen from 10 million in 2001 to 170 million this year.



• This is a technological firestorm of previously unimaginable proportions that is fundamentally challenging ideas of geography, nationality and distance.



• Some governments are full of anxieties that many of the intrinsically American foundations of the internet are subversively engineering US control of their societies.



• Groups thrilled by the freedoms made possible by the internet are at the same time worried about the intrusions into privacy.



• As a professional working in the industry, I can assure you it is nerve-racking: companies are investing billions in 3G mobile networks only to discover a year later that 3G is being transcended by wholly new technologies.



• Even more nerve-racking, going back to Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that the changes that have turned our worlds upside down in the last 30 years are all derivative of a revolution that occurred back in the first half of the 20th century: they are all derivative "normal science" in Kuhn's terms.



• So let me leave you with some questions:
  
  
  • Is the internet going to make the idea of national governments irrelevant?
  • Is the digital divide going to create global political challenges in the future?
  • What role do rules have in something so essentially anarchic as the internet: in short, should we be editing content in Wikepedia or not?
  • One famous sociologist once said that "To live alone, a man must be a God or a beast". Is the social isolation made possible by the internet making some of us think we are Gods, but at the same time making us beasts?
  • Would any of you take a stab at what that next big new idea will be?
  • And perhaps one final very basic question: given the ubiquity of computers and internet based communication, how vulnerable are we if the lights go out - not a trite question given the number of massive power disruptions we have seen around the world in the past few years?



• So, for what they are worth, a few thoughts from a dinosaur. Thank you all for coming.