Civilisation in need of transformation

New directions needed for society and the economy

While a trans-sector approach is a good way to start looking at the interrelation of all of our current challenges, the road ahead will be smart communities, smart cities and indeed smart countries.

This is no longer an issue of trans-sector thinking alone. Significant societal and economic change is now needed around how we organise democracy; how we revitalise regional areas; how we better spread populations; and how we organise agriculture, manufacturing etc.

And it is obvious that the changes must be more far-reaching than simply addressing the direct issues of education, healthcare, poverty and the environment. A new level of human intelligence is required to produce a far more universal approach to the future.

It is not smart to endorse so called safe building standards that enable the construction of nuclear power plants in areas prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. These hazardous buildings should not be there in the first place. Nor should we encourage earthquake-prone cities such as Los Angeles, Tokyo, Christchurch and many cities in China, Turkey, Iran and elsewhere to increase their populations. You cannot empty these cities but you can stop putting more and more people into dangerous situations. Again, just hoping for the best with our 'building standards' will not just cost many more lives – it could also very easily ruin economies and civilisations.

Broadband – a utility for transformation

To go to our own field of expertise, using broadband-based infrastructure as a utility to assist us in building smarter systems would be a good start. But, as we have said to the UN-supported Broadband Commission, as well as to the various governments with which BuddeComm has been involved, nothing is going to change until governments begin to transform their societies and economies.

Japan has one of the best broadband infrastructures in the world, but very few of its government policies are aimed at aggressively using that infrastructure to make structural changes to regional development, e-health, tele-working, smart grids, etc.

True, excellent reports have been written on the subject of societal and economic transformation, and about smart cities; and some of these changes are indeed happening at the edges. But beyond these reports and some pilot projects nowhere are there transforming policies in place to address the underlying structural societal and economic problems.

Everywhere we see the vested interests using outdated government policies (developed in times before the current massive changes in, among other things, population growth) to control many elements of the economy and to resist any form of change.

The key reason is that the social and economic benefits offered by such structural changes fall outside their balance sheets.

And this is why governments will have to step in to make the structural changes that will help their countries move forward.