The potential negative consequences to a flat world are; world superpowers not so super, pirating, and work force balance. As the world continues to flatten out, I find some negative consequences to us as Earth's citizens, one of them being that the world superpowers, one of them being Microsoft, won't be so super anymore. Once we start outsourcing our processing jobs to huge processor labs in Japan what stops them from storing the beginning and finished parts? They have to store them anyway to process them, for example if Microsoft wanted to outsource the compiling job of their new Operating System (in 5 years again?) to Japan; the technician in Japan would have access to the beginning code and the resulting OS. This might be very tempting to the technician because it is the code of the new system, he could install a backdoor (security hole for intruder) into it before sending the result back to Microsoft. Or he could take the finished copy and sell it to all of Japan before Microsoft has all of the copyrights preventing distribution in Japan. This leads to another one of my concerns, pirating. Currently it is a huge problem, software, movies, and music, the main thing that is inhibiting the explosion of this underground community is transfer rates. If you were trying to peer to peer a new movie, chances are it is going to be about 5GB and at a constant download rate of ~150kb, which is highly unlikely, the download would take 12 hours. But if you had fiber channel links, the connection speed would be mind blowing (if under personal use only) you could download that whole movie in 21 seconds flat. Someone tell me that isn't going to catch on with more people than already, we would have people downloading hundreds of movies in one day. That is what results in Microsoft strict DRM (Digital Rights Management) polices if you tried watching a movie in an inactivated version of Windows XP, the color would be inverted and completely distorted, a very unfortunate situation for someone who just hasn't activated windows yet. Lastly another one of my concerns would be the work force balance. In the past years the US has had the jobs of different companies stay in the US, resulting in plenty of jobs for our country. Yet as we move into Globalization 3.0 we see that a lot of those jobs are being shipped off to other countries, and is starting to give good paying jobs for the rest of the world. What happens to the US's work force? The touchables are losing their jobs and becoming unemployed. The outsourcing of jobs is great but it is happening too fast, jobs are being tossed overseas by the Untouchable CEO of a business. He won't lose his job, but will profit more later from Indian workers. There are many more smaller consequences that arise, like distribution of viruses both digital and biological.
The World Is Flat Post 4
