Can technology be harnessed in some way so that gap between rich and poor doesn grow wider?
I have advocated for a long time that the gap between rich and poor, if left to its own devices, will grow. If you have computers and communications, you’re more productive and you grow richer, while the poorer countries that lack those technologies stand still and get poorer. It’s not rocket science. There are several things we can do. The low-earth-orbit satellites are interesting, because half of the time they are over the developing world. So if we leave them on, there is no other business they are doing at that time. With very little marginal cost, we can provide backbone communications to the developing world that are very exciting. The same argument can be made with the geostationary birds for the ghettos of the developed world. Who’s going to subsidize these costs? The richer countries, not just for the benefit of compassion, which is good enough in itself, but for self-protection. If the differences increase dramatically, we are going to have blood, and it won’t be the Banglad
