Following in the footsteps of the French, Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications has decreed that as of July 2010 every Finnish citizen will have"the right to a one-megabit broadband connection" as an intermediary step toward 100 Mb/person in 2015.
If one views brains as supercomputer-equivalents critical to the convergent growth of technology, information, communication and human capabilities, as I do, it becomes obvious that such national policies are beneficial and necessary -- and maddening that we've not made more progress on these issues here in the United States.
Connectivity is not just a stabilizing social force, as Thomas Barnett has pointed out, it is a glue that's critical to convergent growth. It's now high time for more nations to get hip to the idea that their full network of brains makes possible regular value creation and should be optimized for higher use. Hopefully emerging models of individual/social "intelligence" and multi-threaded systems growth will diffuse quickly enough for other countries, large and small, to quickly follow suit.
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About Alvis Brigis
- Alvis Brigis
- Alvis Brigis is a media specialist and futurist residing in Los Angeles. Most recently, he was Executive Producer for The Future of Facebook, the first Open Foresight project to be funded and released, and Story Producer on History Channel’s Invention USA. He’s produced and written for TV networks including NBC, VH1, THC and Sundance Channel. He co-founded Future Scanner (a prediction harvesting tool), Swarmado (a mobile content-sharing app for events) and has developed a variety of forward-looking startups. Alvis serves on the advisory board of Acceleration Studies Foundation and blogs about the social side of accelerating change at Social Node. He’s also an avid sci-fi and comedy writer.
