5G and its implications

# The tech cold war

For the past twenty years, we have enjoyed a relatively peaceful co-existence among the techno-industrial sector. Stability and division of labor between technology companies gave way to a thriving software and hardware renaissance. On one hand you had the incredible advances in manufacturing and prototyping represented by Shenzhen's alchemical ability to produce gadgets. On the other hand you had Silicon Valley's ability to produce software applications and innovative experiences. This created a harmony that contributed to the exponential growth we've seen in the last two decades of digital computing. Now this isn't to say that there hasn’t been conflict and sabotage along the way. However, as a whole, the technology industry and its respective geo-political entities have been cooperative this millennium.

Recent political actions by the US government have splintered this co-existence by blacklisting Chinese companies that pose a threat to national security, namely Huawei. These actions have ushered us into the beginning of the tech cold war.

It's hard to tell which companies will be rallied against and blacklisted by the US government. Most certainly companies that have direct ties to the Communist Party will be deemed as a threat, but there are other companies who exist in a gray-area. Companies like Xiaomi, OnePlus, Alibaba, etc. do not have direct ties to the Communist Party and do not directly pose a security threat, but still exist in the purview of the Party and may be required to divulge specific information.

The competitive advantage favors those companies and players in China. The West does not have the means to produce technological devices end-to-end the same way that China can. In-depth manufacturing and assembly is ingrained in the Chinese tech ecosystem. I'm not aware of any other ecosystem that can build a product along the whole product lifecycle like Shenzhen can--and as fast as they can. From a software perspective, the US is ahead of China. Not necessarily from a technical aptitude perspective, but from a creative and holistic execution. But this is moot compared to the fundamental knowledge needed to connect digital products to the physical world, which involves a lot of chemists, engineers, physicists, machinists, and industrialists--the confluence of which the US has lagged behind China.

# 5G as a symbol

And 5G is stuck in the middle of this all. Similarly to the space race, where space was merely a figurative end goal, 5G will be leveraged as a target to which political, economic, and technological power will be measured against.

While 5G can be seen as merely a bump in data transfer speeds, its symbolic importance in history should not be ignored. The socio-political climate that has surrounded the emergence of 5G will compete against its technological importance.

There is a certain inevitability that is driving 5G, similar to Moore's Law, that wills technology companies into a self-fulfilling prophecy. A whole ecosystem works toward a seemingly predestined mission that will inevitably produce an upward slope on a graph based on time and data i/o speeds.

It should be stated that rolling out 5G requires a complex orchestration between various technology companies, government agencies, environmental regulators, and standards organizations. Competing companies must collaborate and agree on standards that will become working protocols for 5G. So to some degree, companies from various countries will have to interoperate.

# Frequencies and health

In addition to the socio-political turbulence surrounding 5G, there are also biological concerns. While there has not been significant scientific evidence of negative damage to the human body, potential effects on certain ecologies may be present, for instance bee colonies. There are also people who are very concerned with the health effects from 5G and have been vocal in protesting online. Interestingly, Russia’s RT media group has leveraged this fear to dissuade the US population from rallying behind 5G in order to delay its arrival in the US so they too may also have a horse in the race. I certainly worry about the potential health effects of 5G and think they should be researched closely, but given that 5G frequencies exist below a threshold of harm, I'm not sure if they will actually produce malignant effects on human biology. As for the effects on nature at large, it is hard to predict what effects 5G might have on Earth.

# Advent of the AI revolution (disassociation of the natural human)

Beyond health concerns, the modes of living that 5G enables signals a herald to the end of the post-industrial human and the beginning of a coexistence with artificial general intelligence (AGI)--not the singularity, but an awareness and confidence in sentient objects.

5G represents a culmination and destination point in humanity that ignores primitive instinct and desires, and favors rational determinism. This is driven by our preference to disassociate--to lose ourselves in a digital realm. That’s what 5G is enabling. 

# Conclusion

The symbolic importance of 5G has raised a myriad of geo-political, biological, and sociological matters that precludes the technology itself. Even though the full implementation might not be standardized for another five to ten years, the transition period will require a complex set of obstacles to overcome. We will see how the course resolves itself, and at this point, speculation is just that.

I would love to see research that investigated alternatives to using frequencies as the predominant means to transfer wireless data. How can we communicate digitally without harming the Earth or ourselves? After all, the goal is to use technology to reduce our global footprint, not to fill it with frequencies. The best thing one can do is to question the fundamentals of a digital society to help guide us as we enter into the 5G era.