Peter Diamandis: Technology Is Dissolving National Borders

An anonymous reader writes: Peter Diamandis, creator of the X-PRIZE Foundation, has a thoughtful piece on how technology is wearing away at the barriers between nationalities. He asks, "[W]hat really defines your nationality these days? Is it where you were live? Where you work? The language you speak? The currency you use?" Diamandis then proceeds to point out the following facts: Working remotely is now widespread, and will only become moreso once telepresence robots become ubiquitous. Translation services, both for written and spoken language are approaching sci-fi-level capabilities. The rise of cryptocurrencies is providing a method for people worldwide to move away from national currencies. He argues that in the coming decades, these technologies will mature and begin to make the concept of nationality much less important than it is today. Do you agree?

Comments

For wealthy gadabouts perhaps

[spasm]

"Working remotely is now widespread, and will only become moreso once telepresence robots become ubiquitous."

Telecommuting (much discussed on slashdot over the past decade) is fairly common, but still hardly 'widepread' - only 2.6% of the U.S. employee workforce 'considers the home their primary workplace', and the single largest group of telecommuters are federal employees (3.3%), ahead of private for-profit sector workers (2.6%) (http://globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statistics). And even among those (like myself) who would say my home is my primary workplace (I live about 3 hours drive from my employer) still need to go in to the office once a month or so. Which might work in some parts of Europe, but for most fo the world is unreasonably complicated and expensive. And I suspect the vast vast majority of those of us who telecommute or work remotely are still doing so within national boundaries.

"Translation services, both for written and spoken language are approaching sci-fi-level capabilities."

Bullshit. Well, so far anyway. The linked slashdot story contained a bunch of comments from people saying the skype translation was just about good enough for scheduling another meeting time, but you couldn't use it to do actual work.

"The rise of cryptocurrencies is providing a method for people worldwide to move away from national currencies."

Right up until you need to buy groceries or pay rent.

Of course, all these things will change. Machine translation will definitely get better. Telepresence might get beyond novelty and/or uncanny valley and genuinely make 'going for a beer with the boss' on another continent work. And my landlord might even start accepting bitcoin. But with the possible exception of machine translation, the rest of it will remain the province of fairly well off people for a long time. Well off people like Peter Diamandis.

Re:For wealthy gadabouts perhaps

[Kjella]

I think we're far more technologically capable than we're socially willing to use telecommuting. We don't use it much for that, but we have geographically distinct locations working together and it's really not a problem to get the work done. I did use to work for a consulting company and despite there being hundreds of employees, many thousands if you include our owners it felt like a 1-3 person shop with nameless corporate functions because those were the only colleagues I was seeing on a regular basis. Particularly when I was out all by myself there was a pretty big barrier to calling somebody up just to chit-chat, particularly since we'd both be billing our clients for it. I like having an office and colleagues I could talk to, actually once I worked in a start-up incubator where we weren't bigger than that we all talked together and it didn't really need to be the same company. And I'm somewhat of an introvert, I can't imagine how socially starved an extrovert would be. Of course you might say you should cover your social needs outside work, but it's a pretty solid chunk of your day.

Translation services are still crap, but I think we're moving towards more and more people learning a "world language" as a second language if it's not their first. It doesn't have to be English but I think most countries with <10 million people have some bigger language to work with. In Western Europe it's English, Eastern Europe many know somewhat Russian, Middle East it's Arabic, South East Asia probably Chinese, Latin America Spanish or Portugese, Africa mostly English and French. At least in richer countries not being able to communicate with 99%+ of the world isn't acceptable anymore. And that's only going to be become a bigger and bigger network effect to fewer and fewer languages. Other languages are also fairly big but have zero traction to become a world language like German, Italian, Japanese or Bengali, there's only a few real candidates that see significant use by non-natives.

As for currencies, that's probably the stupidest of all. My VISA card already is almost like magic when it comes to paying in any currency for a relatively trivial fee in context. If I was staying anywhere for a long time I'd open a bank account and exchange at an even better rate. A major function of currency is to allow economies to fluctuate, like the Greek debt crisis happened because the rest of the EU with Germany in particular didn't want to let them devalue the whole euro zone. An economy run on a crypto currency would be the same thing, except it would be a technological barrier instead of a political barrier. Nobody needs to hold cash for a long period of time unless they want to, if you want you can buy gold or whatever else you think has "real" value for it and sell it again when you want money.

Stores tell me my nationality

[ET3D]

In the digital world, stores enforce my nationality. I can order a music CD or a movie on DVD from Amazon.com, but if I want to buy digital music or stream a digital movie I can't. The more we move towards digital content the more borders there are, paradoxically.

Re:I could see it happening

[Tom]

A governing body for each continent controlling local policies

you need to look up the word "local" in a dictionary. The continent of Asia is home to 3 billion people, give or take a few, including places as diverse as tech-crazy geeky Tokio and Taliban Afghanistan. You want to govern them with one governing body? Good luck.

The EU has the right idea, even if lots of it is flawed: To keep and respect local identies, but build a unifying structure above it.

There is little that people fight harder then attempts to take away their identity