Technological transformations & dichotomies still to explore in today's world...

By Ricardo Pimentel.

The regional contrasts of social and economic development have always occupied my mind with special interest. Each society in its local or regional scope exposes us a distinct trajectory, specific in cultural and technical achievements. But the differences they demonstrate express in themselves the underlying characteristics related to the degree of technical knowledge and the institutional values they have already attained, and which allow them to manifest more or less of social or collective achievements.

It is undeniable that these differences between societies place advantages and disadvantages in the "relations of power" that continually occur between them, be it between neighborhoods, between cities, between municipalities, between regions or between nations.

There is in this, in simple historical verification, an intense dispute for different types of "territories". These disputed territories manifest many "objects" of interest. Objects that may be essentially geopolitical, in a specifically military sense, or complementarily, may be geopolitical "tones" associated with the commercial, logistical and energy opportunities that each region on each continent potentially presents to potential stakeholders. Of course I am referring to "powerful" stakeholders, in what they have already established for themselves, in industrial, economic, political and military achievements.

Such "things" are far from being new. New may be the intensity that these contrasts increasingly present. Societies that have not mastered basic technologies completely face much greater challenges as they aim to master technologies far beyond those in terms of the scientific and technical complexity that characterize such innovations.

But the scientific and technological advances are increasingly constituted of intense capacity to "destroy", creatively, the current productive paradigms. This certainly signals risks and apprehensions about the possibility of survival of certain businesses and organizations. There is a need for adaptations on the one hand, and on the other hand, a very little-considered and very little-used field of "occupation", which is that of transferring business action, techniques well dominated and tending to obsolete. I speak of the transfer of business action ("the full entrepreneurship of these organizations") to markets that consume their products and services peripherally, without, however, achieving significant levels of social progress, resulting from the wealth that such techniques could potentially generate in these same new and "backward" markets.

Certainly I do not know, especially in its detail, the set of technologies more creatively "destructive" now under way. And I also do not know, in detail, the set of more technologically "backward" regions of the world. Both scopes of my ignorance here I express with sincerity, since I live at an intermediate stage between such extremes. This recognition, however, is insufficient in power to "nullify" the existing world contrasts between our societies. The contrasts are there to be worked out for us, because we are one human society that inhabits the same planet, a globe with limitations of resources, and possibly with limitless creative possibilities present in the core of its own inhabitants.

I believe, for example, that the gradual expansion of rail transport in countries where they are still insufficiently developed will be a strong vector of regional economic development and rationalization of the use of fossil fuels.

I also believe it is necessary to establish new logistic paradigms in the regions where we aspire to greater economic and social development. Many issues and conflicts now present, for example in Latin America, can thus be reversed in logistical, industrial and employment opportunities for companies and professionals both locally and abroad.

In the case of Brazil itself, it is legitimate that its main and more developed cities are thinking of electric cars, hybrid cars, or autonomous cars. But the regions of the country still lacking in roads and pavements, and regions that are still lacking in good railway infrastructure, it is certainly too premature to think of autonomous cars, etc.

There are regions in several continents and countries not only here in Brazil, where currently products arrive and leave through trucks that travel excessive distances for such vehicles to do, with great waste of diesel compared to the consumption of the locomotives. Certainly, these cases indicate opportunities that have not yet been explored by the railway sector and the stakeholders who lead their respective regional and local development policies.