The Practical Futurist: Chennai, Take A Letter

The Internet is emerging as the great equalizer in the world information economy, making all sorts of opportunities available to hundreds of millions of bright minds who were previously shut out. We've seen it in our own office. A few years ago the NEWSWEEK team was developing a Web application for which we needed a particularly tricky little piece of software written. Our lead programmer wasn't sure he could do it and hired a freelancer. Two weeks later, the code came in; it was clever, compact and worked perfectly. But when I asked if I could meet this talented fellow, my employee looked a little uncomfortable. "I don't think so," he said. "He, uh, kind of lives in Moscow." The young programmer had done what seemed natural to him-went out on the Web, shopped around and picked the best contractor at the lowest price.

Of course, the day may come when it's not just a matter of lower cost, but that the United States no longer has the technical talent within its own borders to supply its needs. John Paulos, a Temple University mathematician, has warned in books like "Innumeracy" that the United States puts itself in dire economic peril by ignoring mathematics education. The U.S. system too often lets kids stop learning math at an early age if they don't like it-and thus many students end up inadvertently cutting off the option of technical careers. As a society, America ends up with lots of business people but relatively few engineers who can actually build advanced products or write sophisticated software.

So here's one Internet impact that we might be underestimating: if the United States doesn't fix its math-challenged educational system, then the Internet will solve the problem, by providing access to millions of technically-adept workers in other countries. In the end it might turn out that the information highway America invented funnels many of the nation's best jobs and associated dollars overseas. And then someday, could it be that workers in Oklahoma City will be taking dictation for Chennai?

© 2002