Welcome to the 21st century

By Elwin Tobing

BOSTON (JP): The 20th century will definitely be remembered as one of the most monumental in the history of humanity. It was marked by people's triumphs over nature, but also their dark side, as murderers in two brutal world wars. It bore both great people -- Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa to Albert Einstein for example -- as well as wicked ones, such as Adolf Hitler and other tyrants.

The century witnessed unprecedented advances; from the revolution in communication technology to sophisticated innovations in medical techniques. Revolution in the development of new materials and the diffusion of information technology has altered what people produce and consume. Progress in transport and communication has kept people moving at a quick pace and made the world forever a smaller place. Such progress has helped to fulfill human obsessions to cross new frontiers, even into space.

The creation of powerful drugs, diagnostic tools and medical procedures have reduced mortality rates and enhanced the quality of life. A newborn in America in 1900 had a life expectancy of 47.3 years. Today, it is almost double. One of the latest developments -- the Human Genome Project -- aims to specify the location and structure of all the 100,000 or so genes in the human body, while cloning practices have made the future both challenging and hazardous.

Those innovations occurred for many reasons, including greed, ambition, conviction and accident. However, two primary impulses above all seemed to spur them. The first was the ambition to conquer time, with the goal to spend the shortest time in every activity. The second was due to an obsessive desire to get the most out of every activity with minimum effort. This is called efficiency.

Less than a half century after the Wright brothers flew their fragile biplane Flyer at 6.8 miles per hour, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier flying at 670 miles per hour on Dec. 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Caroline, the United States. And when the legendary Titanic left Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, it was supposed to dock at New York the following week. It was one of the fastest passenger ships at that time. Today, with the supersonic Concorde, it takes only three hours to reach London from New York.

Not only has traveling time been reduced dramatically, the speed of communication across distance has also increased magnificently. On April 7, 1860, the first Pony Express rider left St. Joseph in Kansas carrying mail for California. It took him days to deliver the mail, and the chances that all the letters were received by the right persons were slim because the route was hazardous. In the early 20th century, it took weeks to deliver a message from Boston to Jakarta. Today, the invention of computers and fiber optic networks, with their ability to make unimaginable amounts of data instantly accessible to millions of people, has enabled one to send and receive messages instantly from anywhere in the world.

As the world moves forward to explore the opportunities of the information age, the time required to process information becomes a decisive factor in every activity. Today's desktop computers, weighing less than 20 kgs, have the same capabilities as the early supercomputers that weighed tons and were the size of a big room.

These fascinating achievements will not be complete without a revolution in how people put the inventions and innovations to work. In his Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, Frederick Taylor offered solutions for improving industrial efficiency, from piecework incentives to time cards and worksheets. The validity of Taylor's ideas and their extension is an unstated assumption in almost all companies in the world today, making it difficult to discuss any other mode of running a business. As the modern management guru, Peter Drucker, stated, Taylor is a "social philosopher of industrial civilization".

Certainly, Taylor was not the only laborer on the farm. The brilliant Henry Ford spent six years experimenting with moving assembly lines before installing the now-famous one at Highland Park, Michigan, in 1913. The perpetual flow of parts and materials typical of the assembly line became characteristic of how industry and the economy at large operated and still prevails in today's highly automated forms.

Edward Deming then introduced methods of how to control the quality of industrial process and produce the best results. By refining Taylor's complex management approach, Deming, regarded as the father of quality control, successfully built up the Japanese industrial manufacturing base in the 1960s and 1970s. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge in his book the New Economics, essentially states that improvement in the grade of products and services can be achieved if proper technology is implemented optimally within each operation. This process will eventually boost efficiency and benefit everybody -- stockholders, suppliers, employees and customers.

These extraordinary people have not only successfully, though not completely, conquered both time and space constraints, but have also designed the most efficient ways to organize our work and produce the most out of it. The question now is, where will the inventions and innovations of the 21st century lead to?

In his 1899 novel, When the Sleeper Wakes, H.G. Wells predicted supersonic aircraft would fly from London to New York in two hours. He also foresaw that in the 20th century color television would bring viewers images from around the world instantaneously and hypnotism would replace drugs and anesthetics in medicine. In the latter, he was wrong.

Long before his time, Julius Verne, in his Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, predicted the submarine and also forecasted that a rise in the population would lead to automated baby-feeding machines. Again Verne was both right and wrong.

No one can predict the future accurately. As the physicist Niels Borr said, "Prediction is extremely difficult, especially about the future." The main difficulty with forecasting the future is that it hasn't yet happened.

But whatever the future brings, all inventions and innovations should be aimed at enriching human lives. Revolutions in science and technology have immeasurably enriched our material lives. In less than a century since 1870, per capita income has increased 25-fold in Japan, 11-fold in Germany and nine-fold in the U.S. If we are to realize the enormous potential of a society living in peace and harmony with its environment and each other, people must first learn to use science and technology to enrich all people's lives.

Edison once remarked "let the public throw bouquets at inventors, and in time we will all be happy". But not all people are happy. Today, around 20 percent of world population or 1.2 billion people still live in poverty. Some people and some countries get richer while other people and other countries get poorer. Inventions and innovations are neutral, they do not bring unfair results. It is up to people to use them to promote the prosperity of all mankind.

Einstein is widely claimed as the smartest person who ever lived, Edison was the greatest inventor of the 20th century with 1,093 U.S. patents and Ford was the inventor of the mass market system. But it is Bill Gates who is the richest person in the world. He is neither the inventor of Windows -- in 1979 Xerox Corp's Palo Alto Research Center already employed personal computers with fancy graphics displays and mice -- nor its mass marketing system, two determinant factors behind Microsoft's success. There is something wrong with the way the inventions are economized.

And today, many company executives earn thousand times more than low skilled workers. Low paid workers at a shoe factory in Tangerang, West Java, can never imagine wearing the shoes that they produce since their cost is as much as their monthly wage. This creates a large inequality between people and a big gap between people and the products they produce.

The question, therefore, is not only who gains from making innovations economical, but also how we can share them. A remarkable example is Henry Ford. When he introduced his Model T car in 1908, Ford stated that "it would be so low in price that no man making a good salary would be unable to own one". Ford triumphed because he made automobiles efficiently, created a market for them by paying his workers US$5 per day -- a tremendous amount at that time -- and pricing his cars cheaply.

When the 21st century dawns, the world most incredible innovation would not be the spurring growth of E-commerce or smaller, faster and cheaper computers. It would be human beings realizing the fundamental essence of the 20th century's innovations and use them to enhance the living standards of all people around the world.

This may sounds too illusory, even hopeless, but it is still worth thinking about.

The writer is studying for his doctorate in economics at Boston College in the United States.