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A popular idea is that ‘Japan is from the future’ — that technology there as a whole is more advanced. This is probably the inspiration for the much-overused Gibson quote “the future is here, but it is not fully distributed”. In reality, Japan has what TVTropes would call ‘schizo tech’: affordable personal robots are available and toilets have bidets and mp3 players, but offices still use fax machines instead of email and documents get distributed on paper by couriers.
Schizo tech is truth in television: every culture’s advancement levels look inconsistent and lopsided from the outside, because what you invest in is based on what you value & what is made easy to improve. More specific & accurate than ‘the future isn’t evenly distributed’ is ‘development in a field is proportional to the means of development’ — most importantly, the means of imagination (the prerequisites for accurately imagining potential practical solutions to problems).
The means of imagination include:
- attention (you have to think about problems to solve them, usually),
- incentives (need, profitability),
- and path dependence (do the resources you already have make solving the problem easy, and does the way you talk & think about the resources make it easy to imagine that solution).
Sometimes these things come together: Japanese robotics tech was driven by a government program to fund research in robotics caused by a projected need to care…
