This is what the Internet population is projected to look like in 2015.
What got me thinking originally was this quote from one of the readings for my Consciousness and Virtual Reality class. I can’t find the original page now, but the idea has been passed around.
(principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.)
That’s what I’m talking about. I think Sri Lanka has a chance to come out on top of Post-Industrialization. Especially since we’re near the huge Indian Market, of which, right now about 200 million are middle-class… which is a huge Consumer Market to tap into. Sri Lanka has the added benefit of being a liberal, small nation compared to the bloated and inefficient Indian bureaucracy. There’s the likelihood of huge growth. My argument is that a small investment in the children of Sri Lanka will pay huge dividends in 15 years. We’ll have a crazy-smart workforce if we get the kids on the Net now.
I think the next Bill Gates will be brown.
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The map of Internet users was done by the GlobaLab Research Center. I got there from cybergeography.org, which has some really fascinating maps of the Internet. I like maps and I like the Internet. It’s one of my favorite sites ever.