President Obama's Vision

In China, Liu Junluo (Chinese: 刘军洛) is well known on his extraordinary analysis on the global and Chinese economics. Several months ago, I posted his prediction on who the winner of the financial crisis would be. With time, more and more likely his prediction is indeed sound, again!

Recently, Junluo had another insightful posts titled President Obama's Vision and Mr. Bernanke's Regional War. The thought in the post is very sharp and farsighted. I cannot help myself from sharing the mind to the Thinking Space readers. However, I only translated the first part of his post. The full article in Chinese can be found here.

---

President Obama's Vision

The Bogeyman of thinking is to tell that the earth is round when everybody else says it is flat. This is called vision.

If Mr. Obama had agreed to spend 200 billion U.S. dollars on saving the largest U.S. automobile manufacturer, the world might not have thought that the U.S. industry was decaying indefinitely. In fact, the 200 billion U.S. dollars is totally incomparable to the speed of money-burning in Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem is, however, why Mr. Obama chose to let the whole world think that the American industry is dying.

In October 1999, the entire human population global wide exceeded six billion. By 2020 the number will exceed 8 billion. 8 billion, however, is about the maximum number of people our Earth may safely sustain.

In two years, i.e. 2011, in United States the baby boom generation will start to retire. In the next 20 years, this 78 million American baby boomers will retire completely. They are the world's richest generation ever and they are the generation the most willing to spend. What will the world be when all of them are retired?

By 2030 the proportion of the aging population in United States and Germany will rise rapidly to around 26%. In Japan it will reach more than 30%. What will these senior people demand after the retirement? Medical care, nursing, recreation, pets, religion, and blue sky! At the meantime, they will consume less on many of the industrial products including particularly such as automobile, and they will save more money in bank.

Now in United States a senior over 65 is supported by 3.9 members in the young labor force. By 2030 the ratio will become 2.4:1. The same average ratio in all of the world's developed countries at the time will be 2.5:1. In the next five years, the tax burden of the ordinary labor force in all of the developed countries will substantially increase. If the total demand within the emerging countries especially such as China and India could not substantially increase, (i.e., the average wage of their main labor force is not increased substantially), in the next five years, by 2010 at least 50% of the automotive business and the iron and steel manufacturers will be eradicated by the sharp fall of the global demand in general.

Therefore, Mr. Obama chooses to force the largest U.S. automobile manufacturer to enter the age of small batch production. At the same time, the saved labor force will be redistributed to produce America the bluest sky, the clearest water, the best health care system, and the most superior legal system in the world. Since 2010, in every developed country all over the world a greater and greater force of the rich and retried people are looking for the best living environment, the best medical care services, and the best legal protection for their retirement life. This is a trend irresistible.

Now China has exclaimed to invest 900 billion U.S. dollars in the auto industry, boating industry, iron and steel industry, and cement manufacturing industry during the first half of 2009. Moreover, there are ongoing government projects in such as the road, bridge, and railway construction in no less than one trillion U.S. dollars. In southern China, a bridge-construction project leader excitedly announced to the people around that the 10-billion U.S. dollar new bridge will be completed in 2015, and it will shorten the time of cargo transportation in the region from the current 4 hours to about 40 minutes. The same excitement was also among the people surrounding him.

In 2015 the tax burden of the ordinary workforce in all the developed countries will be increased, which inevitably will lead to the substantially reduced rate of consumption among this workforce.

In 2015 a large percentage of the baby boomers in United States have already retired at home; and they will reduce the rate of consumption.

In 2015 the labor cost in India and Vietnam will be more competitive than in China.

In 2020 the most popular job in the world will be pension agents, who restlessly run among the richest generation of the retired people and sell them where the bluest sky is, where the cleanest environment is, where the clearest water is, where the best medical services are, and where the most superior legal protection is.

If an elder couple generates in average five million U.S. dollars in consumption after the retirement, and in the next two decades the United States attracts three million couples global wide to consume its best environment, best medical care, and best legal systems, it is a 15 trillion U.S. dollars business!

In 2010, the poor sells automobile; the rich sells medical care and law protection; and the wealthy sells clean air and water.

Mr. Obama is among the few first ones who know how to act properly when our earth is OLD, and when the 78 million U.S. baby boomers are also OLD.

In summary, the greatness of mind is that the monopoly of wealth stands opposite to the mass thinking.

Five Web Trends Into 3.0 (2)

2) Web resource, diverging

Divergence is the act of moving away in different direction from a common point. The continuous divergence of the Web resource types is ineluctable when the Web enters 3.0.

One way to evaluate Web resources is to measure their ability of productivity, i.e., how feasible a resource can be manufactured to produce information asset. In essence, any Web resource is a combination of data, service, and link. By divergence it leads to the newer ways of resource representation so that the represented resources become more productive for further information manufacturing. This progress is a consistent process in Web evolution.

A question is, however, that which new types of Web resources emerging would be essential to foster Web 3.0. In the other words, which of them would be the fundamental building blocks of Web 3.0 as if the manual tags and the RSS of Web 2.0.

Although no conclusions yet, there are a few interesting candidates. For example, the mobile data representation formats such as the iPhone data structure. By storing data in these transportation formats, the data becomes universally mobile computable. Though it is still fairly a distance from the real ubiquitous computing, the advancements increase the productivity of the mobile Web data, a particular portion of the Web data.

Another example is Google Wave. Google Wave shows a new type of service resources that can effectively consume many typical Web 2.0 resources by allowing these Web 2.0 resources running on top of it. When we say the revolutionary change Google Wave brings (or will bring), it indeed tells that Google Wave examples what the services in Web 3.0 might be looked like. Its real innovation is not how the service works, but what it consumes!

By Wikipedia, the divergent evolution is the accumulation of differences between groups which can lead to the formation of new species, usually a result of diffusion of the same species adapting to different environments, leading to natural selection defining the success of specific mutations. This definition is indeed also applicable to the ongoing divergent evolution of Web resources into 3.0.

Previous installment: Five Web Trends Into 3.0 (1)
Next installment: Five Web Trends Into 3.0 (3)

Five Web Trends Into 3.0 (1)

It is said that Web 3.0 is coming. I agree to the point. However, what is Web 3.0 indeed? Few people have the answer. But there are five Web trends that may help us peek into the core of this next generation Web. In a five-post series I am glad to share my thinking of the five trends in this blog.

1) Personal space, converging

From homepage to site profile, the evolution from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is also a process of the divergence of the personal home spaces. In Web 1.0, a Web user generally uses a homepage to claim his Web existence. In Web 2.0, however, a Web user often have varied profiles in multiple Web sites, while each of the profiles may (nearly identically) claim his Web existence. Intuitively the progress likes that a single, uniform homepage has been transformed respectively to multiple, varied personal accounts, each of which is settled with respect to a particular Web site. The personal home space diverges.

This personal space divergence was necessary for fostering Web 2.0 because it allowed the Web 2.0 entrepreneurs the flexibility of creating the variety of social networking products. Hence it facilitated the growth of Web 2.0.

On the other hand, the divergence also leads to a few problems. With the mature of Web 2.0, Web users are required to remember more pairs of the login/password for their registered sites. In addition, if there are Web 2.0 sites functioning similarly and the users want to use both (a common case in Web 2.0, for example, to use both of Del.icio.us and Twine for bookmarking), it is uneasy for the users to synchronize the same information in the varied sites simultaneously. The barrier becomes especially severe when the users try to update some basic information in the profiles (such as change an address), despite the message is common to all the sites. In short, Web 2.0 has inevitably led to producing a huge amount of duplicated information fragments in the Web and it is very hard to synchronize these fragments.

To solve this problem is thus a major request for Web 3.0. OpenID is such an attempt by unifying the logins in the Web. We can predicate that the adoption of OpenID must prevail continuously in the age of Web 3.0.

But OpenID is not the whole solution. The ideal solution to the problem is to have the diverged home spaces be converged back to a new form of the unified personal spaces as if the Web 1.0 homepages. Yet we still have fairly a distance to implement such a solution, it is the first trend into Web 3.0. Only through this transformation, we may eventually declare Web 3.0, a new stage of the Web that is essentially distinct to Web 2.0.

Continuing the series The Path Towards Next Generation, No. 2
Next installment: Five Web Trends Into 3.0 (2)

It is the free choice that produces the value of mind

A computer can execute a program and output a result. What does the asset of mind generated by a computer different from the mind asset produced by a human being? The difference is the free choice. A human can make free choices upon a request that are beyond any sophisticated program can make. It is thus this freedom bringing the value. This distinction could be essential when we think of producing the mind asset for the coming next-generation World Wide Web.

Inherent Complexity

A breathtaking picture, compound intent, inexhaustible extension. Does it tell the beauty of the nature or the beauty of the mind? Or it actually reveals the both. If a tiny simple water drop may disclose facts in such a greater scale, how great may an already big complex being such as a person disclose? It is the compound me that matters.

The picture is from Flickr. At here it is the original link to the photo.

June 4th

June 4th, 1989, I was in China. It is a date that had changed the history of modern China, in many aspects. In particular, it drew a line between an idealist China and a materialist China.

The picture on the right is a perfect illusion of the distinction. In the middle there stand two Premiers in Chinese history. The one in the front is Zhao Ziyang (Chinese: 赵紫阳), a Pre-June-4th Premier. Behind Zhao it is Wen Jiabao (Chinese: 温家宝), a Post-June-4th Premier (actually Wen is the current Premier of China). The picture was shot at the night of May 19th, 1989, when Zhao was trying to comfort the students in Tiananmen Square. At the meantime, neither of them was the Premier (Li Peng was the Chinese Premier in 1989). But Wen was the director of Zhao's office.

Zhao and Wen had very different personalities. Zhao was more or less an idealist that was similar to Mikhail Gorbachev of Soviet Union. In the mind of Zhao, China might not rise again until Chinese people could gain the political freedom. The thought liberation must be prior to the flourish of economy. In contrast to Zhao, Wen is more a materialist. Wen believes the economic growth be the first and the political freedom be the second. In his mind, it is fine to ask people to temporarily scarify their various freedom to exchange a better life in material satisfaction. The right of living is above all the other human rights, including the freedom to think; a typical philosophy of the extreme materialists.

It is not my duty to judge the correctness between the two thoughts. (The reader might judge it yourself.) Inevitably, however, this philosophical distinction significantly reformed China.

The majority of the youth generation in China before the June 4th were eager in fighting for gaining more freedom in all aspects of the nation. They were interested in national politics and dreamed of China to be an ideal society that might be governed by leveraging the collective voice of its people.

The majority of the youth generation after the June 4th, however, abandoned the former seemly intangible dream. They started to pay the most of their attention to earning money and enjoying the material life. They care less of the national politics but care more on individual interest. China does have achieved breathtaking progress in economy since then, while it has also paid heavily on the loss of morality national wide. On one hand, this period of Chinese history is a legend of economic growth. On the other hand, in the same period the nation had sold its soul. The absolute truth in China disappears. All truth becomes conditionally right.

Is this China what we expect? Is this China the best interest of all the Chinese people? The only thing that I can tell definitely is that China really could have been a totally different nation if there were no June 4th, 1989.

A great discussion about Imindi

Thanks to François Dongier, who gave a fairly insightful discussion of the pros and cons of Imindi in the current stage. I think that it is definitely worth of being shared to more readers. Here is the link.

In particular, I quote the conclusion section of the article in the following.

"Lost in the ocean of distracting facts and contingent news, thoughts are rare and indeed very precious. There is an important sense in which they are what really matters to us, as an essential aspect of our human nature. They are also important in a more "practical" sense, playing a central role in the economy, as the major source of all the inventions that lead to new products. There are now new web applications like Imindi, Primal Fusion and, maybe to a lesser extent, Twine, that really focus on thoughts and try to isolate them from the stream to make them more visible and reinforce their efficiency. My view is that such applications will have a great impact on how the web evolves.

I personally find extremely attractive the fact that this project is very ambitious. It's got the nice A.I. feel that you also find in projects like Wolfram|Alpha and Twine. It's not just an ordinary web app: it wants to be disruptive and revolutionize the way we communicate and think together. Maybe it will fail, if the problem of efficient thought-modeling and thought-merging turns out to be too complex for the current technology. But it certainly looks worth giving it a try."

UPDATE: here is rancois`s thoughts on Imindi. A graph itself is better than 1000 words.