"Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"
This was Yali's question, the basis of Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, a question which was explored in my first Technology and World Change class in SMU. The question basically asks why there are wide variations in development between countries especially with regards to technology, something that is still widely debated today.
The factors that have led to this difference are hard to pin down, ranging from events in history to the differences in culture that caused people to react differently to the adoption of technology.
I feel that this then touches on many far-reaching concerns, such as our attitudes towards technological development, the interactions between countries that leads to the progress or hampering of our technological development as well as how to bridge the ever widening technological development gap between countries.
It is important that we consider these concerns carefully and use the knowledge that we have to build a better world :)
Brief Overview/Summary
Professor Shahi started off with a round of introductions and questioned us on what we knew about Technology and World Change. We then proceed to discuss which events in world history we felt led to the difference in technological development between countries. We found that factors such as their culture, religion, warfare won through superior weapons and the use of germs, among others affected the variations in development between the different world regions.
We then watched two videos. The first was Shift Happens, a video that showed some shocking statistics that gave us a better idea of the context of the world that we live in. The second was a documentary based on Guns, Germs and Steel which showed images of countries such as Papua New Guinea and the United States of America juxtaposed against each other which made the vast differences in their levels of development all the more apparent and emphasized the poignant message of Yali's question.
Interesting Observations
One of the most interesting things about our lesson I felt, were our class responses to the questions that Professor Shahi posed, which was, What do you know about technology? In our world today, possibly due to the proliferation of images that the various broadcast mediums such as the television and social media associate with the word technology, it has been so ingrained in us that technology is synonymous with information technology and devices like smartphones, computers and other digital devices and hence those were the things we talked about.
However, this misconception was soon corrected as Professor Shahi explained to us that technology was actually a study of what we know and how we do it. After having the mindset that technology was a tangible machine or device, thinking about it being the study of how we do things was certainly refreshing!
This led onto another interesting observation that I had, when Rebekah raised the idea that the first invention was the wheel! Personally, I had often heard people say this was the case but Professor Shahi refuted the idea, saying that he felt it was fire! This was a revelation for me because I always thought that fire was natural like trees, I mean you don't have people saying that trees are technology.
However, when I applied the above definition that technology was the knowledge of how to do something, I realised that fire is indeed a technology because the people had to to figure out a way to produce fire and that process of causing fire to come about by rubbing stones together, for example, was technology!
Later, Professor Shahi also uploaded an article about the invention of the wheel on our Facebook group which I found particularly fascinating and you can read the article here. This was because the article suggested that the reason why we took so long to invent the wheel was not because we couldn't imagine that a circular object could turn on its edge but that we also had to think of a way to affix it to a platform where we could place the objects we wanted transported. This involved a number of considerations such as how tight to fix it such that it would still turn but not fly off the axle.
This made me realize that the innovation of technology may not simply be about thinking of how to create a device but it actually involves thinking of the entire process of how it may be integrated into a final method(which may be in the form of a combined device) in which we can apply to achieve the initial objective.
Thirdly, I had often wondered why some of the less developed countries were so unwilling to accept help from the more developed countries. Surely, they would want to learn something from the more developed countries and perhaps share in a bit of the spoils of their "cargo".
A nugget of history shared in class soon answered my question. The European and American colonizers used to give the people of the New World, blankets under the guise of being generous but these New World blankets actually had smallpox scales on them, causing the people of the New World to catch the disease when they slept with the blankets. This was a form of germ warfare and many of the New World people died as a result of not having any immunity to these newly introduced diseases.
It is no wonder then that the less developed countries are now apprehensive and suspicious when we provide them with aid now, having been scarred from the terrible acts in history waged upon their people. It was rather amusing to note however, in another nugget of history shared in class, that all was not lost for the New World, who did manage to get one back on these colonizers by infecting them with syphilis.
It is important to interacting with other countries as we benefit from sharing resources and through learning from each other to help improve one's own practices. However, with the New World being so afraid of interacting with the colonizers for fear of exploitation, they are less willing to open their doors to trade and to learning from them and this may have widened the gap in development and the lack of new technology being introduced in the New World.
This brings me on to my next point in my Key take away points from the lesson, which is on the importance of countries interacting with one another to stay relevant and to be able to share both the expertise and the technologies that other countries may have.
Key Take Away Points
"Stay Hungry, Stay foolish."
This quote by the late Steve Jobs is a pearl of wisdom that we should remember, especially in the context of a country's development. Staying hungry would provide the impetus and the drive to keep a country on a continual pursuit of further improvement and attempts to learn from one another.
It could be seen that each time a country thought that they knew everything that there was to know and that they had nothing more to learn from other countries, they were inclined to close their doors to the rest of the world. This would cause them to fall behind because they were not learning from the other countries, or trading with them and by being so insular, they would begin to deteriorate. This was most clearly shown in the case of China who closed their doors to other countries and began to fall behind even thought they were the ones who first to invent revolutionary technologies such as paper and gunpowder.
Another key takeaway was the importance of having a culture that supports technological development which will affects the level of development. The Muslim communities in the Middle East and the European societies are two good examples of communities that changed their attitudes towards technological development.
Both communities rejected the practice of medicine and had an attitude that was against the pursuit of technological development that was caused by politics or religion which caused their progress to be affected. This shows the importance of having a culture that promotes technological development whilst being balanced with a respect for religion and a good management of the political situation in the country in order to facilitate technological development.
My third takeaway was a statistic from the video "Shift Happens". I was shocked that there were more people in 25 percent of China's most intelligent population than the population of US. As the video paraphrased it, there are more honours students in China than the US have people. This made me more aware of the immensity of the differences in population across countries and caused me to consider that this might be in fact another reason for the differences in development across countries.
Perhaps, due to China's enormous population, if even a small percentage of their people were to be experimenting on creating revolutionary technology, that small number may be significantly larger than that of America's percentage and statistically they could possibly have invented better technology by the sheer number of the people working on it. This could be the main driver of difference in technology between the countries as China could have more people working on invention and hence produce more results faster. However, with so many people, it would be difficult to spread adoption of such technology throughout the population as it would be necessary to convince the people of the benefit of the technology which results in differences in development within the country itself.
Issues for further discussion
1) I felt that we could touch on the various arguments set out by Guns Germs and Steel as to the differences in technological development such as the presence of a certain type of climate or the inherent intelligence of certain types of people over others or even the presence of suitable environmental conditions for agriculture cultivation.
2) I also felt that we could discuss about how the knowledge we have about the different factors affecting technological development could be used to help improve our country's technological advancement and extrapolate it to the world as a whole taking into account the cultural differences and current levels of development of the different countries.
Personal ratings for session
I would give this lesson a rating of 7/10 as I found that this session was very useful in clearing my initial misconceptions about technology. The videos shown really helped to couch me in the world context for the future lessons about technology and I felt that it gave me a different perspective on what we construe to be technology. It also made me question the role of technology in the world other than that of devices such as handphones and this helped me to widen my world view, making technology a concept much more interesting than an object created to serve a function.
Looking forward to next week's lesson!
Cheers,
Amanda Tan
