world's 6 communications sytems

[chris macrae]

Between 1865 and today 6 different communication systems have existed for sharing information, making friends, buying and selling, innovating soliutions to urgent challenges, choosing heroines and heroes and arts as well as evolving transportation and power systems

Lucky people among today's 8 billion human beings are now co-creating our 3rd new system in under a generation. I will call that web3 or metaverse to distinguish it from web2 when privileged people (around 2003 on) started using smart mobile etc devices that tracked info from their location GPS) and web1 which most people say began in 1990 around rim berners lee worldwide web. This system was connected by computers notably personal computers.

Something that changed the world in 1865 was some countries coming together to shape the telegram system - the first of many telecommunications systems - eg telephones telexes, radio, television, ... where sharing one system is practically essential. The first countries to build telegrams located the ITU in Geneva. Now its true that telegrams also benefited from the invention of electricity and the scaling of railways. All these things started to make living in cities more attractive for many people than living in rural areas without tele 1. So we call rural areas without electricity grids tele0. And because an awful lot of new technologies including computational connections  have accelerated since world war 2,  I call that era tele2.

Communications systems have brought bad consequences as well as good. For example after 80 year of tele1 , asymetries between the 8 most powerful users of tele1 the G8 brought world war2. (Yes I know that the person who made war 2 inevitable was adolf hitler - but the reason why the United Nations was born in 1945 was to try put all nations back on a good track but needed the most powerful 8 to rebuild as well as take responsibility for over 80% of people living in other places (almost half the world's people were on the india sbncontient and in china)- places whose peoples had been disconnected from an equitable world trade by empires (notably Britaon's)

I believe in designing web 3 - we need to ask ourselves what needs changing that the last 80 years spiraled into more wars and crises with nature be these climate, plagues or other ways. WE need Un2 to include every nation in this butas we noted some have more privileged experiences than others.

Lets go back to the quarter of the world's people who were in tele0 to near the end of the 20th C. What did they co-create since the 1970s and how have they leaped forward in the last 2 decades?

As recently as the 1970s up to a quaretr of humans loived in humid tropical vilages far from coastlines and without electricity grids. What they had to woirk on was small agricultire (food and drink) , health, education, builsing community and safe one room homes. What they needed was noit charity but vailage busienss howebver small wiyn positive cashflow. To end starvation they needed crop socience particularly for rice - the number 1 connector of this miracle is Noram Borlaug and his alumni (see eg world food prize0. Vilage mothers also needed to develop basic health services for infants and mothers. One huge invention turned out to ve a cure for diarrhea whisc in the tropics was killing upo toa third of inatats. If a mother is in time to mix bi=olied water sugar and salt in the right proprtions this is a live saver. In Bangaldesh the most successfil busienss franchisse ddordashed ten basic medivines- each mother was assigned a bisienss route of 300 homes to vist weekly. Over tie she also became thhe trusted knowledge source - eg for mass infant vaccination. AS well as growing a surfeit of food, vilage ceaft busienss and sociasl forerstry provided examples which could hgenerate trade with peoples oin te cities. In building safe communitoes , bangaldesh's ;eading model of womens nation building also taught mothers to train up as barefoot lawyers. And after the first 12 yeras of the new nation of banagldesh, vilage mothers together with brac designed vilage primary schoolig systems . These built on a blend of montessorri and paul freire methods.Between 1970s the solutions porest tropical vilages needed were largely replicable across borders. there may have been diferent funding models and different reasons why rasing womens productivity to half of the natiosn whole but most of the life shaping needsd and socytarinst were similar. Wjat happened towards the mned of teh 190s is partners started to bring mobile phones and solar. Now the world's poorest vilage women could be in the middle of some of the most exciting leapfrpg models. They have leapt the generation taht needed landline phones or electricity gtids, but when one looks a drts of resources shown on the 17 sdgs- poorest vailgersd are still mainly becoming self-suffiencnt on foord, health, education, womens community buildiung, finance. When we look at eg saniation isues of water, yes they use pit latrines but in terms of wtaer infrastructures they are dependfent on an integrated natioanl strategy. In bangaldeshthe greatest scaler oif tese solutiosn was asked to start offering solutiosn aroudn teh world'' he decdied the best way to continue with development baagldesh needed next and worldiwde sharing of solutiosn was to start a university the most cooperative university on the pkanet wherever graduate alumni want to share solutions to sdgs

Ironicaly thebottom quater of huamns being may have ended poverty but with an economic size of say 3% of the wprld's wealth and the only renewable footprint. When the worldf meest annualy to discuss climate , its the peoples whp have just memerged from the tele0 atra who often have the deepest daat on climate adaptation. SDuring teh seocnd decade of brac university, sir fazle abed clarivied his intent to be not only the university woith deepest knowho of rural end poverty but to invent some solution creating 50 million livelihods around teh wporld. He reasoned that the world needed at lesast 60 new cooperation univesitoes t0 crae 3 billion new jobs : green, last mile community, and hi tech. He proved he could design two world needed solutions.A benh,ark design for pre-scchols everyhwere. n ultra grant mechanisms for the 15% of vilage mothers who were too pooe to apply for microfinace. Whats interesting iswhich of the 6 diferemt states of communicatiosn do you see as likely tp produce one or more livelihood coopeartion unibersitiesd. How does the university fit into the UN2 model.

===

HO does nature locate her asstes vis a vis whe is living in which comunicatios s ate. How does what is poosible with vital service slike health and education chnage by richness of coms.Wg=ho's got the most ability to design web 3; millennials who have only grown up with webs; or the oldest quarter of the world's people typically over 60 or those aged between 30-60. Hpow does government include all these different expereinces as well as recognise that extinction is a risk the youinger haf of the world may experience because in some way or another we parents of the world lost what used to make our species smartest- the wish for our children to have more opportunities in life than we had had.

indeed whats' the point of educatio  systems if they dont get snarter from generation to generation. And do we nderstand whats happening in web that has never hapened befpre. Basically 1 dolar computer brains can when connecetd together do some tings humans never could. Can we design the art intel to augmeent / im[rove huamn intel not to rteplace it?