Why India will supersede China (Part 1 and 2)
By
JAN KRIKKE
DECEMBER 5, 2018
Part 1
For much of recorded history, India and China were the most influential civilizations in the world, partly due to the size of their populations and geography. Cultural and political reasons explain why China has outpaced India economically in the past 40 years. But China’s place in the sun will be shortlived. A report from the OECD predicts China’s share of global output will peak in 2030. India now outpaces China in economic growth. Indications are that the land of Rama and Shiva will become the shining star in the post-industrial era, and not for strictly economic reasons.
Demographics will play an important role in the development of China and India in the coming decades. China is aging more rapidly than almost any country in history. Its dependency ratio of retirees/workers could rise to 44% by 2050. This will have a serious impact on taxable income, entitlement programs and healthcare. China’s attempts “to become rich before it becomes gray” partly explains its enormous investment in robotics, biotech and artificial intelligence (including “
AI-DNA”) to address looming problems with labor shortages, elderly care, and healthcare costs.
In the past 25 years, hardly a week went by without China setting new milestones. After lifting some 600 million people out of poverty, China became the world’s largest producer, exporter, and importer of virtually everything from electronics to oil and green technology. China is the largest trading partner for most countries in Asia, and close to becoming the most important economic partner of most countries in Africa and South America. The entry of 600 million Chinese workers in the global economy is the main cause for the deflationary pressure that is felt in the West and the rest of the world.
China’s exploding tourist industry suggests the country may succeed in getting rich before it gets old. It will soon be the world’s most important tourist market, both for inbound and outbound travel. Less than 10% of the Chinese currently have a passport, but Chinese tourists already make up the majority of the visitors in most Asian and some European countries. China is expected to replace France as the most visited country. In hotels around the world, Chinese payment systems start appearing next to the familiar logos of Visa and MasterCard.
The end of poverty
China’s economic growth has slowed in recent years to a more manageable 4- 5%, while growth in India has accelerated to 8%. Despite the geopolitical rivalry between the Asian giants, 68% of Indian imports come from China, compared to 25% from the US. 16% of Indian exports go to China, against 48% to the US. The latter explains the growing trade friction between the US and Asia.
China is India’s leading supplier of capital goods used by Indian producers to manufacture products for the Indian market, and it is the dominant supplier of consumer electronics and green technology, including solar panels. Chinese suppliers control 87% of the Indian solar panel market, in part because of China’s economies of scale and in part because of subsidies from the Chinese government. Indian producers complain they can’t compete with the Chinese makers, but others argue that Indian consumers benefit from inexpensive solar panels subsidized by the Chinese government.
India also benefits from other inexpensive Chinese consumer electronics. Chinese makers of smartphones control more than a 50% share of the enormous Indian market. Indian producers find it hard to compete, let alone catch up, with Chinese hardware manufacturers.
But India has long been a powerhouse in software services and has now set its sight on artificial intelligence. According to the networking site LinkedIn, India ranks third in the world after the US and China in terms of AI skills among its workforce. The country has a disproportionally large IT industry and strives to become a global AI hub for developing countries.
A discussion paper from government think-tank NITI Aayog, “
National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence,” pitches India as the “AI garage for emerging and developing economies” with a focus on five key sectors – healthcare, agriculture, education, smart cities & infrastructure, and smart mobility & transportation. Globally, there is little innovation in the social sector and a focus on agriculture could make India a model for other developing countries.
India’s agriculture sector employs nearly 50% of the population but contributes less than 18% to its gross domestic product. Given the growing popularity of urban and organic farming, India could strive to make its farmers more productive rather than reducing their number for its own sake. Making farmers more productive can also limit the flight to the city and reduce environmental pressure caused by urbanization.
India is repeating China’s feat of massive poverty reduction. Between 2006 and 2016, India lifted more than 270 million people out of poverty, at a rate of 44 per minute, one of the fastest in the world. If the country continues to grow at the current 8%, it will have eliminated poverty by 2030, the same year that the UN-sponsored
Sustainable Development Goals blueprint aims to eliminate global poverty. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1.90 per day. The 10 fastest-growing economies in the world, six of them in Africa, are also expected to end extreme poverty by 2030.
Hierarchy of needs
What happens to countries that have eliminated extreme poverty and have provided the majority of the people with their basic needs? Western nations, Japan, Korea, and other developed countries, paint a less than rosy picture. Levels of material well-being have increased dramatically over the past 50 years, but so have social and psychological isolation, alienation and drug abuse. Depression, the main cause of suicide, claims more than a million lives per year, indicating that material comfort does not automatically translate into mental well-being.
While pockets of poverty remained, the US reached material well-being for the majority of its population in the 1960s. The “Sixties Generation” grew up in material comfort, which led to alienation as well as a search for “meaning” and a growing interest in spirituality, including Eastern spirituality. The so-called counter-culture movement focused on “raising consciousness.” Yoga, meditation, “healing,” mental coaching and counseling became growth industries. The Global Wellness Institutes estimates that the global wellness industry is now worth $3.7 trillion and is growing by over 10% a year.
The US pattern repeated itself in Europe and has also reached East Asia. Japan and Korea saw growing levels of depression, alienation, social isolation, as well as the birth of new spiritual movements and cults often centered on charismatic leaders. The trend has also reached China. The quasi-spiritual movement Falun Gong, (literally “Dharma Wheel Practice”), has attracted 70 million followers. First taught publicly in Northeast China in 1992 by master Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong mixes Buddhist and Taoist disciplines with a Confucian-inspired moral philosophy based on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Falun Gong was a reaction to the “materialist” outlook inherent in communism that was further fueled by economic liberalization.
In the 1940s, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced his famous “hierarchy of needs,” a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in five stages. Maslow’s pyramid-shaped diagram mirrors the development of modern society in fulfilling five needs in five consecutive steps: physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Maslow later added a sixth and arguably ultimate need: transcendence.
Economic and political mismanagement have prevented many developed countries from providing for people’s basic needs, but the global trend of poverty reduction is progressing, and it confirms Maslow’s theory: When basic needs are fulfilled, people start looking for meaning and the nature of consciousness. Making a life becomes as important as making a living.
Part 2
Science has yet to define and fully understand consciousness, but the debate has been given a new impetus by artificial intelligence, where the issue centers on the question: Can AI develop its own consciousness?
The meaning of the European word consciousness as we understand it today is often attributed to René Descartes (1596-1650), who used the word “conscientia.” Others attribute the current notion of consciousness to John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” published in 1690. Locke defined consciousness as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” An 18th-century encyclopedia defined consciousness awkwardly as “the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do.”
The growing interest in consciousness in Europe, as expressed by Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” has been explained as the liberation of religious (Catholic) dogma that had Europe in its grip for centuries. In China, the equivalence of consciousness was expressed by the term “heart-mind” and had Confucian-ethical connotations concerning how humans should act in society. The “seeking,” as opposed to believing, was left to the Taoists.
Only the ancient Vedic-yogic tradition of India developed a comprehensive framework for the study of consciousness. India has been called the land of seekers without a religion but with millions of gods. By some estimates, the yogic tradition that aimed to define and develop consciousness goes back 10.000 years. The country has rich literature and elaborate terminology related to consciousness and has a new topicality. Subhash Kak, an Indian-American computer scientist, explained in a recent article that the Indian notion of consciousness could be crucial to the future of modern science. He writes:
“Scientific attitudes towards consciousness have changed due to the recent advances in neurophysiology and because modern physics and computer science are confronted with the question of the nature of the observer. In many ways, the study of consciousness is center-stage in the discussions of modern science. On the other hand, a considerable part of Indian thought is devoted to the question of consciousness.”
He adds: “Note that there are intriguing parallels between the insights of the early Vedic theory of consciousness and those of quantum mechanics and neuroscience. In the Vedic theory, which dates back to at least 2000 BC, one views awareness in terms of the reaction that the hardware of the brain provides to an underlying illuminating or awareness principle called the self. This approach allows one to separate questions of the tools of awareness, such as vision, hearing and the mind, from the person who obtains this awareness.”
Several pioneers of quantum physics were aware of the correlation between quantum mechanics and the way the ancient Indians described reality. Erwin Schrödinger’s work on quantum mechanics was partly inspired by Vedic thought. His influential book
What is Life? was infused by Vedic thought. Theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner and other students of Schrödinger’s work have since argued that advances in physics would eventually require us to include consciousness in the scientific framework. The seemingly curious notion in quantum mechanics that “the act of observing subatomic particles changes their behavior” can only be understood by understanding human consciousness.
The field of psychology has also struggled to understand consciousness. The prominent Canadian psychologist Ronald Melzack recently wrote:
“The field of psychology is in a state of crisis. We are no closer now to understanding the most fundamental problems of psychology than we were when psychology became a science a hundred years ago. Each of us is aware of being a unique ‘self’ different from other people and the world around us. But the nature of the ‘self’, which is central to all psychology, has no physiological basis in any contemporary theory and continues to elude us. The concept of ‘mind’ is as perplexing as ever.”
Sadhguru
Jaggy Vasudev, popularly known as Sadhguru, is one of the modern incarnations of India’s ancient yogi. Sadhguru is equally at home with ancient yogic practices as with quantum physics. His book
Inner Engineering was an international bestseller. He has spoken at the United Nations, MIT, and Stanford and has shared the stage with prominent quantum physicists, economists, and social scientists throughout the world. He also has 5 million volunteers for his Isha Foundation, an international organization that is active in social outreach, education, and environmental programs.
Sadhguru articulates the intricate yogic view of consciousness in a language that resonates with people across all cultures. He explains that in the yogic tradition, consciousness has 16 different dimensions that are distilled in four main categories:
buddhi (intellect),
manas(memory, both mental and physical),
ahankara (identity, sometimes referred to as ego), and
chitta (cosmic consciousness).
Sadhguru compares the intellect to a knife. It is used to dissect and analyze things. The intellect is controlled by memory, our personal databases of stored knowledge and the accumulation of experience throughout our lives. Identity is shaped by family, social and cultural environment, education, media, etc.
Intellect evolved from instinct developed as survival skills. Memory and identity explain why people use intellect in different ways even though we all rely on the same natural and universal principles to survive. Sadhguru explains our connectedness to the universe in terms even a child can understand. We all depend on oxygen, which is produced by trees, grasses and tiny ocean plants drifting with the ocean currents (phytoplankton). Plants rely on the sun for photosynthesis, of which oxygen is a byproduct. Just by holding our breath for one minute or longer makes us aware that we are part of this universal process.
In recent history, industrialization and modernization have put excessive focus on the intellect in education and society as a whole. The trend started in the West, spread to East Asia as well as India. Intellect played a key role in modernization but it is now showing its limitations. Sadhguru explains that the intellect is a knife that helps us to cut open a flower and study its inner parts, but the intellect alone is not able to grasp the totality of its existence.
Sadhguru is living proof that striving for higher consciousness does not have to be an aim in itself. It can spur us into action, born out of a sense of connectedness with everything and everybody, from suffering children to deforestation. The Isha Foundation’s Project Green Hands mobilized two million volunteers to plant 30 million trees in India, the largest ecological project ever undertaken in Asia. Sadhguru also initiated the River Rally by traveling 9,000 km through India to raise awareness of the plight of India’s rivers. His 5 million volunteers around the world are active in education, healthcare and other social programs not provided by governments.
The deity within
In the 20th century, power tools and robots relieved us of most physical work. In the 21st century, AI will relieve us of most mental work. When AI can do everything humans can but do it faster and better, it will arguably be the last science we will ever need. AI will handle virtually all tasks that require intellect and can be captured in mathematical structures.
What AI will not be able to develop is human consciousness, if only because we do not yet fully understand what it is and how it develops. Consciousness will increasingly be the focus of AI, quantum physics, psychology, and many other disciplines, including the social sciences.
The best AI can do is simulate consciousness, and Vedic knowledge of consciousness offers a blueprint. Its view that consciousness consists of four parts explains much of human behavior, among them the seemingly inexplicable behavior of fanatics; their intellect has been hijacked by their identity, whether based on nationality, ideology, or religious belief.
Vedic understanding of consciousness is attracting growing interest from the neurosciences. Two years ago, Bala Subramaniaman, an anesthesia specialist at Harvard Medical School, asked Sadhguru how anesthesia makes one unconscious. Sadhguru responded by saying: “Anesthesia cannot touch consciousness, it can only take away memory. What you are referring to as consciousness is wakefulness. We do not consider wakefulness as consciousness. Being wakeful and being conscious are two different things… Consciousness means you went beyond your memory and grasped the nature of reality as it is.”
Sadhguru and other yogic teachers are modern interpreters of India’s ancient tradition. Their knowledge will play an increasingly important role in the future of science, psychology and AI. When AI can handle most mental tasks, people will wonder: What’s next?
While the world looked at the West for science and East Asia for “application technology,” they will look at Vedic sciences to explore the ultimate frontier of consciousness. It will put India center stage, if not as an economic powerhouse but surely as a “spiritual superpower.”
Vedic science provides a manual for our consciousness and shows that the same cosmic principle sustains all that exists and that the distinction between human, god(s) and the universe is artificial. It explains why India has 33 million deities, one for every conceivable phenomenon that partakes in the reality of our existence. Transcend your identity and your memory and you will see deities everywhere you look, only to realize that one of them is you.
Part 1:
http://www.atimes.com/why-india-will-supersede-china-part-1/
Part 2:
http://www.atimes.com/why-india-will-supersede-china-part-2/
