Speeding Towards the Future

The other day I was talking to a volunteer who is finishing up her service in May. We were joking about how far behind she will be in terms of technology. Her Blackberry, which here is seen as a very snazzy phone, will probably be most useful as a paperweight when she gets back. Looking at my ipad, she remarked that tablets were just coming out when she left. Now it is a full-blown market with new models coming out regularly from multiple sources. This got me thinking about what will be out on the market in two years when I return. I read an article that the biggest advances of the last 50 years were not nearly as huge as from the previous 50 years. My grandparents’ generation saw cars, televisions, vaccines, commercial airlines, and the atom bomb*. Life was drastically different at the end of their life from what it was at the beginning. Recent groundbreaking inventions include the Internet and the Internet. Everything else is more evolution than revolution. This article said the main advancement of the modern era was instead the rate of technological advancement. Every day, current technology is evolving at a faster rate than the day before so in two years this volunteer missed tablets. Where will the world be after my two years?

And then I look around. There are times when one could easily forget that Guinea is also living in 2012. When you see a woman wearing a pagne (a traditional wrap around skirt) pounding manioc root into powder with a wooden mortar and pestle while the pot is heating water over a wood fire; or when you see a girl walking back from the well, down a dirt path, with a bucket of water on her head and a baby on her back we really could be at any point in the last 200 years. Of course there are also places where you can get on the internet, where the roads are paved. In Dubreka, I saw a brand new Porsche. Cell phones are everywhere. Since I am in a city, there are cars and mopeds all around. So Guinea has not taken the linear approach to development that we are used to in the US. There are many parts of it (usually and unfortunately the parts concerning women) that remain dangerously (ex: vaccinations, waste management, wells, traditional latrines, wells way to close to latrines) in the past. Then there are parts that are almost right up there with Europe in the United States. Well they are really about ten years behind but if you can picture these services as they were in 2002 you will be able to see Guinean usage of cell phones and websites.

With the exponential rate of technological advancement and the ever decreasing size of the world, it does not take a big leap of the imagination to believe that the discrepancy between the standard of living in the US and Africa will not continue to exist. Africa will probably continue their “take this, leave that” approach to development, but eventually has to touch all the aspects of living. There eventually has to be paved roads, reliable electricity, running water, safe vaccinations, mandatory schooling ect. How it gets there and what form these advancements take will be fascinating to see. So I guess the point of all of this is that I am curious to see how the US will change by 2014, but what really fascinates me is Guinea 2064. 

*Sorry if I am off by 10-20 years with these. There is no electricity while I am writing this and so no chance of internet.