THIS week I was fortunate to be in a rainforest in Tropical North Queensland. (Incidentally, they prefer to call it that because the initials sound better than those of Far North Queensland.) Anyway, it started to rain, as it does in rainforests.
But the remarkable thing is that in a light rain you do not get very wet, provided you are standing under the canopy rather than in the open. The canopy absorbs an extraordinary amount of rain which gets converted into vegetation or evaporates before ever hitting the ground.
It is much the same with sunlight. Not much of it gets to the ground. There is not much trickle down in the rainforest. The plants that make it to the canopy and all the vines and ferns (epiphytes) that latch on to them do well. Those that don’t perish.
Life at the bottom of the rainforest is at best difficult.
But at times this is where indigenous people have had to survive. And survive they did, relying on one thing: information.
After, presumably, centuries or millenniums (yes, I prefer English plurals to pretension) of trial an error – a lot of it fatal – the indigenous population learned which plants could be eaten (often after leaching out poisons); which plants could be used as tools and weapons – either their wood or sap; which were insecticides and which could cure various maladies.
It showed an extraordinary intelligence and adaptability, especially given that Australian indigenous people did not have at their disposal the suite of domesticatable plants and animals – sheep, goats, horses, pigs, hens, wheat, oats and barley – that similar people in Europe had 10,000 year ago.
Theirs was an information age, but the information was passed down verbally – all the way to my guide Ronald who showed us how he could use the soap-tree leaves to coax fish to a spearable distance.
Then all of this knowledge became virtually worthless. Other technologies and products did the job more cheaply and efficiently. Aeroguard beats squeezing the juice out of a jungle tree, and is more effective. The grains and fruits from Europe are more nutritious and easily obtainable.
No matter how intelligent or ingenious the earlier technology a new technology will wipe it out or leave it used only by a marginal few afficiandos. But the new technologies while advantaging the many can leave many behind.
Shortly after the walk in the rainforest, I tried to tune in the FM radio in the lodge and got nothing. An AM radio might have got something, but so many radios these days do not have the AM band. FM is superior for all those in its reach, but hopeless for those on the outer.
With these things in mind, I thought awhile about Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s new broadband dream. In general, it has the potential to do wonderful things, perhaps more wonderful than its architects imagine.
It is not just higher speed internet. The speed will be such as to replace a large number of older technologies.
On a mundane level, why bother with manufacturing DVDs. Whole high-definition movies will be downloaded at a trice.
At the medium level, creators of websites will use the new speeds to add high-definition video and make all images high-definition making retail over the net a more realistic proposition. On a higher plane, a specialist in a city will be able to perform robotic surgery on a patient far away. The surgeon will be operating on the basis of information received – video visions from inside a body transmitted at the speed of light across a room or across a continent.
Video conferencing has been around a long time, but it is crude. After Ruddnet it will be real time and so near to being there that clients will not need to visit lawyers, architects, surveyors or even doctors. You could be medically examined in your own home.
This is all fantastic stuff, but with this caveat. The new net will reach only 90 per cent of Australians. But that is critical mass. The new technologies will wipe out a lot of the old and those 10 per cent will be caught short.
On a mundane level they will not be able to download the high-definition movies, but the no-one will be producing DVDs because the market will not be big enough – so they will miss out altogether.
At the medium level, most commercial websites they attempt to enter will be denied them because the sites will have presumed mega speeds.
On a higher plane, some medical and professional services will be more difficult for them – they will have to travel to a megaband site or possibly be regarded as a nuisance not worth dealing with by service providers.
More critically, the copper-wire network may not be worth maintaining, so they will lose their telephony and not have access to the real-time video telephony that the other 90 per cent enjoy.
It is not just a case of saying the 10 per cent will be denied the advantages of new fibre-to-the-home internet, they will also be denied access to existing technologies and services that the new internet will force into extinction. This does not mean that we should not go ahead with the fibre network. Many have worried about its cost and the possibility of obsolescence. Well, such public infrastructure has a social benefit, like roads and defence and we all pay for them through taxes. The fear of obsolescence has, unfortunately never prevented massive military purchases.
In any event, I suspect the new technologies will come from make the fibre more efficient rather than obsolescent – as with the copper wire to date.
No, the critical thing is to watch for some of the social and economic inequities that will emerge from the 90-10 split and try to deal with them. It is not absolute wealth or deprivation that causes happiness or misery, but relative wealth or deprivation.
You could be happy and information-rich at the bottom of the rainforest, provided everyone was there.