What's tomorrow's critical infrastructure?

By Jason Lim

Back in 2001, I visited China to go to Mount Baekdu, which sits along the border between northeastern China and North Korea and is considered the mythical birthplace of the Korean nation. Its place in the Korean creation myth is so important that Kim Jong-il’s official bio claims that he was born on the mountain, although Soviet records say that he was really born in the village of Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk in Russia.

In any case, I actually wanted to talk about getting on a bus in Jilin to ride for four hours along a brand new highway to reach Mount Baekdu. While the highway was new, everything else was still old, including what passed for roadside bathrooms that should have been more accurately named organic fertilizer storage facilities. But what struck me was that everyone carried a cell phone, even the old Korean-Chinese owner of the pork barbeque restaurant that we stopped at for a quick bite. Seeing that cellphones were still not commoditized even back in the U.S., this was a bit surprising. In fact, the guide told me that China wasn’t laying down any phone line since the future was cellular communications. China was all about putting up cell towers and skipping phone lines altogether.

I tell this story to make the point that today’s infrastructure is not tomorrow’s infrastructure. Take autonomous driving, for example. If autonomous driving vehicles become the norm in a few decades and revolutionize how we travel by car, what’s critical infrastructure then?

Do you still need traffic lights when cars would be able to sense each other’s locations and adjust accordingly in real time to avoid collisions? After all, what’s a traffic light if not a crude means of communication between groups of human drivers? Would you still need parking lots in an autonomous Uber-like environment when you won’t need to own cars anymore since autonomous cars will be at your digital beck and call, customized to your life patterns?

What about all the pipelines that we need to transport crude oil to refineries, in addition to tanker trucks, underground gas storage facilities, gas stations, and numerous other subcomponents of the huge infrastructure that we have built around our society’s dependence on petroleum for energy? If Elon Musk’s electric cars, home battery packs, and solar roofs become the new norm, do we still need to pump oil and transport it to somewhere else?

On the other hand, you would still definitely need Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity _ this would definitely be considered critical infrastructure since everything will stop functioning without that constant connectivity. The connectivity speed will be just as important because it would literally be a matter of life or death when your car is crossing that intersection at 80mph.

What about banking? Bitcoin just passed the price of gold in the stock market for the first time this week. If blockchain technology becomes the new norm in financial dealings, as well as any type of informational exchange between entities, what is the critical infrastructure that we would need to support that new transaction model? Certainly cybersecurity, resiliency, and robustness that support any such transactions would have to be considered critical infrastructure. In this case, infrastructure is not just physical constructs, but would include people, processes, and technology.

What about social media? If social media becomes the standard platform for connecting people, can it be considered critical infrastructure, rather than just an application running on a critical infrastructure? How widely does a technology have to be adopted in order for it to graduate from being nice to have to critical to have?

These changes are coming. No one knows for sure what will disappear as a one-hit wonder and what will stick around to define the new normal. One thing we know, however, is that today’s infrastructure isn’t tomorrow’s infrastructure. And tomorrow’s critical infrastructure won’t be solely made up of physical “things.”

Correctly predicting what tomorrow’s infrastructure will be and investing accordingly will be the competitive edge that municipalities and even nations will have to come out ahead in the next decades. If you are still laying down telephone lines while everyone’s talking on the cellphone, then you are Western Union in the world of Bell. Or Pony Express in the era of FedEx. And so on.

Jason Lim is a Washington D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. Reach him at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook.com/jasonlimkoreatimes or @jasonlim2012.