Susantha Goonatilake

The Shift to Asia
Cultural Implications For Science And Technology

[text of his slides]

Technology: China from Chaser to Maker
The new Chinese THUMP chip roughly comparable to Intel’s Pentium II, is yet another example of how China is putting itself in the driver’s seat in key industries.
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL Dec 8th
“China is tired of being a technology chaser and want to be a technology maker.” China is establishing norms that one day will be adopted worldwide.
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL Dec 8th

Meanwhile: The Rise Of India
Growth is only just starting, but the country's brainpower is already reshaping Corporate America 
- COVER STORY Business Week On Line DECEMBER 8, 2003  

The Rise Of S&T India
Bangalore’s General Electric's John F. Welch Technology Center, engaged in fundamental research for most of GE's 13 divisions. Engineers here have filed for 95 Patents in the U.S. since the center opened in 2000.

The Rise Of S&T India
Quietly but with breathtaking speed, India and its millions of world-class engineering, business, and medical graduates are becoming enmeshed in America's New Economy in ways most of us barely imagine.
Business Week DECEMBER 8, 2003

The Rise Of S&T India
By some estimates, there are more IT engineers in Bangalore (150,000) than in Silicon Valley (120,000). Meta Group Inc., figures at least one-third of new IT development work for big U.S. companies is done overseas, with India the biggest site.
Business Week On Line DECEMBER 8, 2003

The Rise Of S&T India
Andrew S. Grove, CEO of Intel: "it's a very valid question" to ask whether America could eventually lose its overwhelming dominance in IT, "From a technical and productivity standpoint, the engineer sitting 6,000 miles away might as well be in the next cubicle and on the local area network."

The Rise Of S&T India
Harnessing Indian brainpower will spur innovation, US job creation, and dramatic increases in US productivity that will be passed on to the consumer”
Business Week On Line DECEMBER 8, 2003

The Rise Of S&T India
India is penetrating America's economic core. "India has seeped into the marrow of the Valley."

India is accelerating a sweeping reengineering of Corporate America. "Just like China drove down costs in manufacturing India will drive down costs in services."
But, is this all there is to it?

Other tectonic changes could be occurring that would rock the cultural and design givens on new technology
The world, it is a changing

The Shift to Asia
Three hundred years ago, the dominant powers in the world were in Asia.
Thereafter, the West became dominant.
Today a process is under way whereby Asia will once again be the dominant player in the world.

The Shift to Asia:
The shift will imply that within the next 20-30 years the big economies in Asia will rival those of the West
Still, especially in South Asia average incomes would be lower than the West
There could be also gross disparities within countries

The Shift to Asia:
Asia’s Science and Technology output which is related to total GNP, will rival that of the West
This economic shift is occurring with a global redivision of work. There is a new relocation of brainpower, and a shift in science and technology towards the Asian cultural region

The Shift to Asia:
Thousands of Asians man research facilities in the West. Large number of Asian graduate students in American universities.
A considerable proportion of scientific personnel (>30%) in Silicon Valley, are Asians.
Biotechnology is following software production fast in India.

The Shift to Asia:
The overall bulk of S&T output in Asia for the foreseeable future will be those whose contours were drawn in the West
But here I will explore what Asia’s unique contributions can be

The following ideas have been presented in my following books
Susantha Goonatilake - relevant books
Merged Evolution: the Long Term Implications of Information Technology and Biotechnology (Gordon & Breach 1999)
Toward Global Science: Mining Civilizational Knowledge (Indiana University Press 1999 and SAGE India 2000)
Technological Independence: the Asian Experience (ed.) the United Nations University, Tokyo 1993)
Evolution of Information: Lineages in Genes, Culture and Artefact (Pinter Publishers, London, and PBS Publishers, New Delhi 1992)
Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the Third World (Zed Press London 1984)
Crippled Minds: an Exploration into Colonial Culture (Vikas Publishers, New Delhi 1982)

The Shift to Asia:
This shift of science and technology to Asia is occurring amidst a shift in less measurable cultural spheres. Eurocentric hegemony is being lifted.
Thus some of the best novelists in English, the primary carrier of globalization, are today Asians.
Designers from Hong Kong, Japan and now Malaysians set Western clothing fashions.
And, the Philippines is the capital of the cartoon film world.

Newer Technologies
Asian cultural inputs become more vital in the case of information technology and biotechnology
They can be "cut" and shaped culturally in many more ways than earlier technologies.
The question then would be which cultures and which societies will be mapped within these technologies as they unfold in the future.

Biotechnology Reshapes
Biotechnology could reshape and reformulate among others, life, death, health and beauty.
The ethical as well as esthetic criteria on which these are decided upon are deeply culture bound
If debated within the Asian region's different cultural traditions would give different answers from those of the West.

Information Technology
Advanced information technology aims at cloning the partial behavior of the mind.
This raises deep questions for those parts of Asia that have strong cultural and religious traditions emphasizing the importance of the mind and mind culture.
Asian inputs on the ethics and nature of AI could strongly influence the direction of information technology.

Older S&T and Asia
The Asian region is also rich in non-European derived intellectual activity.
Some recent research indicates that these indigenous Asian aspects could also become a useful adjunct to developing new technology in Asia.
Remember: knowledge elements held by simpler societies, hunter gatherers, have moved on to modern medicine.

Science
Asian knowledge can be brought in two broad ways
One is to splice-in existing material that has demonstrable direct validity.
The second, bring as metaphors from other traditions to nudge the imagination and give rise to new concepts.

Civilizational Knowledge
A large reservoir in Asian civilizations of:

Empirical knowledge
Metaphors
Theoretical constructs
Civilizational Knowledge
Examples exist of such Asian items incorporated into recent modern science
Into medicine, mathematics, physics, psychology etc.
Details in my Toward Global Science: Mining Civilizational Knowledge
IT, AI and models of the mind
Theories of the mind and mental processing has influenced how IT and AI has developed
So models of the mind could be natural candidates for splicing in Asian thought

Asian Psychology
South Asia has a very long tradition of study of the mind and mental processes.
Many of these approaches could find uses in the contemporary world.
Some studies of contemporary Western psychologists show parallels with Asian traditions.
Specific Asian techniques already used in particular medical areas.

Psychology
There is potential for interactions between Asian and contemporary study of the mind and mental phenomena, including philosophy of language, methodology, ontology, metaphysics and in AI and IT models.
The comparative studies literature has brought out many parallels between Asian and Western concepts.

Cognitive Sciences and Artificial Intelligence
Example: Francisco Varela has used Buddhist insights in extending the limitations of both the neo-Darwinian adaptation in biological evolution and of the current paradigm in cognitive sciences.

Cognitive Sciences and AI
Indian and American researchers have successfully used the approaches of the fifth century B.C. grammarian Panini to develop software for machine translation.
Already a basic system has been demonstrated for translation between Hindi and Kannada. 

Epistemology, methodology, ontology
South Asia has had very sophisticated discussions on epistemology.
South Asian psychologies have a wide variety of constructs that rival in their richness and empirical spread the contending systems, that came to being in the West in the 19th and the 20th centuries.
Comparative studies have brought out many parallels between Asian and Western concepts.

Multiple logics?
Western logic is twofold, 'X' is either 'A' or not 'A'.
There are four-fold logics in the Buddhist tradition and a seven-fold logic in the Jain tradition.
In the four-fold logic, there are four categories. "X is neither A, nor non - A, nor both A and non-A, nor neither A nor non - A." Jain's seven-fold logic is an expansion of these categories by adding three other categories.

Samsara Literature
Philosophy of Samsara literature describes problems of lineages that carry properties forward (Karma saya)
Very much reminiscent of philosophy of lineages in evolutionary theory
Possible uses in evolutionary theory and applications in IT.

Social theory for new technologies
In the new world of information technology and biotechnology there are new ethical challenges not met before.
These problems are raised because these technologies clone parts of the body and the mind.
These are the subject of intense discussion on the essential nature of the human that is being intruded upon by these technologies.

New Technologies, Old Answers?
New developments will increasingly allow intervention in the brain/neural apparatus.
Another intrusion to human identity is thru IT. Example: interfacing devices like Virtual Reality, blur gap between what goes inside and outside the subject, the internal intrusions of prostheses become very intimate. Virtual Reality also brings into question the constructor and the constructed.
These types of questions are regularly dealt with in Buddhist and other South Asian philosophies.

Virtual Realities
Virtual reality exists inside a person's consciousness. VR has the possibility of immersing participants in worlds that are almost indistinguishable from the real world. VR environments can be made to merge with real ones.
It could therefore become a laboratory where basic questions in philosophy such as "What is reality? What is perception? Who am I?" can be posed and answers attempted.

Virtual Realities
It is a technology for examining what is meant by reality. Questions that are posed in VR relate to questions of presence, simulation as opposed to reality, objectification (that is first person or third person perspectives) and so on. Questions of ontology that is those that describe the difference between real and unreal appear very early.

Virtual Realities
Questions of the construction and nature of reality are presented at the very design level of VR. For example how should users of the technology present themselves within VR? Should they appear to themselves in the "third person", as just one set of objects among others being displayed?

Virtual Realities
Or on the other hand should the VR presented be through their eyes, from their perspective, as happens to the user of his own sensing organs in real reality? Should there be a link between the persona on the VR set and the user so that when the persona in VR suffers say an injury, a similar injury occurs in the real person

Virtual Realities
The largest storehouse of permutations and combinations on questions relating to reality has been raised in the South Asian traditions. Virtual Reality provides for a mechanism to observe and model many of these different states of reality-constructions. In the reverse direction South Asian philosophy can present a large set of modeling possibilities in VR.

Virtual Realities
Thus, one can have the observer and the observed in different permutations and combinations. One can even have the observer observing the world of another observer that is through the virtual reality helmet of another who is in the field of perception. The possibilities are endless.

South Asian Explorations as a New Periodic Table
Using South Asia’s explorations it would not be a difficult task to have a “periodic” table of all the possible positions in ontology and epistemology.
It would give a table of almost all possible “realities”, and also almost all the possibilities of apprehending them and knowing about them.

A New Periodic Table
Gaps in such a table when applied to existing fields of S&T, could provide for hints into further exploration, just like gaps in the Periodic Table gave rise to search for new chemical elements.

Using metaphors
Two broad means of appropriating Asian knowledge. First, by splicing Asian knowledge directly into the contemporary knowledge structure.
The second, the uses of metaphor. At crucial times, new views and new metaphors cross disciplines, and new theoretical perspectives are formulated.
How such imported metaphors function, has been the subject of recent work.
Metaphors: “pregnant mother" of science
Metaphors have been considered as "the pregnant mother“ to science
Theories in science often originate in metaphors.
Metaphors implicitly transfer semantic features from one semantic field to another, entirely different one.

Inflows Of Metaphors
A vast soup of metaphors and theoretical constructs exists in the Asian world.
These vary from sophisticated debates on the nature of ontology and epistemology, to discussions in psychology, the nature of mind, mathematics and medicine. Such an infusion would help enlarge our scientific horizons.

Some estimates
Can we have any measure of the potential that exists in splicing-in techniques?

Catalogues
During the last hundred years, probably two thousand catalogues of known South Asian manuscripts have been compiled.
Each catalogue gives about two hundred manuscripts. So, one is talking of about 400,000 manuscripts.
Others have estimated that South Asian manuscripts amount to some 500 million.
This figure gives an idea of the huge potential in store.

A Fresh Vigorous Amalgam
The worlds of ideas were brought together and packaged in Europe in a fresh vigorous amalgam. The Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the great discoveries in the 19th and 20th centuries have been the resultant outcomes.

A New Packaging Possible
Now, a new packaging is possible. The role of a dominant center over a periphery is eroding as near-instant communication spreads knowledge creation across a wide network. Further, new historical research is bringing out hitherto cognitively hidden nuggets.

A New Renaissance?
Varela:
"It is our contention that the rediscovery of Asian thought, is a second renaissance in the cultural history of the West, with the potential to be equally important as the rediscovery of Greek thought in the European renaissance".

How far this may be true is for the future to decide.
Welcome then!

To the Bauhaus of the 21st C.

Construct the East-West cyber-interface

(It fuses; and it may even rock!)

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