Topic 128

ethical considerations of IT-rich versus IT-poor nations as a result of differing access by Kent

Though information technology has greatly developed, the development did not occur at the same rate around the world. Such innovations have concentrated in powerful nations and many poor countries were left behind. Thus there now are IT-rich and IT-poor nations and there obviously are many disadvantages for IT-poor nations compared to IT-rich nations.

The main problem that this fact that information technology is not distributed equally throughout the world causes is that it widens the gap between the rich nations (as in wealth) and the poor nations. Information technology increases efficiency and it brings wealth to the country. It is obvious that a firm that utilizes computer will be able to lower their costs, have a better performance, and basically achieve a greater success than a firm that has no advanced physical capital.

IT-rich nations will flourish more and more by the technology while IT-poor nations strive to achieve standard in technological development. Also, the lack of numeral services such as banks over the internet is a disadvantage. So, what happens is that the people who has ambitions and wants to live a better life will try to leave their home country and go work in IT-rich nations. Because skillful human resources seek their success outside the nation, such nation falls behind even more.

Information technology also has great impact on education. In IT-rich nations, these technologies are integrated in their school curriculums. So people living in those nations are normally used to computers and various programs such as Words, Power Points or Excel from young ages. It is only in these IT-rich nations where higher level of such technology can be studied. Therefore, more and more efficient and useful human resource are created and these people creates better systems and technologies in these places while the only people learning higher level technology has left the place in IT-poor nations.

Because of this, most of the workers in IT-poor nations who are supposed to bring wealth and technology to the nation are not skillful enough. This lack of skill is why most of the labor forces in these countries have to do the hard physical jobs for companies owned by nations outside and the skillful people in their country gets the most money with less and easier works. This is how the IT-rich nations get richer and richer in both IT and wealth while IT-poor nation has to work harder and harder to catch up. In order for the IT-poor nations to catch up to the rich world, an advance in educational curriculum is inevitable.

There of course are ethical issues related to this matter. It is unfair for people who were born in IT-poor nations because chances in their lives are limited. Ethically speaking, ideally every human beings are supposed to have equal chances for success and happiness (though it is impossible), and it is the IT-rich nations’ responsibility to help such nations and share their technology and wealth. The solution to this matter is probably well organized educational system provided by the IT-rich nations for the human resources in IT-poor nations.

It efficient people that brings wealth and technology to the country (wealth and technology comes together and the other brings the other) and it is good educational system that creates those. It should not merely be a curriculum whose only goal is mass production of workers like almost all curriculum throughout the world is but should contain learning of being business owners because it is always the businesses that directly brings wealth to the nation and if the nation had lots of workers but no business owners, the workers will have to end up working for companies of other nations as they are now.