GPS is 'Next Internet Revolution' says CNN's Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek and host of Global Public Sphere for CNN Worldwide answered questions about prompting job creation in the U.S. in a session of the show broadcast Oct 31. Among the fields Zakaria discussed as having huge potential for growth was Global Positioning Satellite technology which he credits as the fuel behind the “next internet revolution.”

Funding from DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department’s venture capital group helped GPS make billions of dollars for the private sector in the same way their research funding for the internet did in the late eighties. “The mobile revolution,” as Zakaria refers to it, is a major success of DARPA that will continue to generate revenue for the government and money for the private sector. Jobs and investments in technology are the best way to create jobs in the U.S. where the education level makes many positions in unskilled labor unattractive.

Zakaria, who is among the best respected financial commentators in journalism today, suggested that research donations for technological advancement, which were once at 3 percent, are still necessary in order to stay competitive in the current global marketplace. America needs more investment in industries that will continue to shape the way society works and people communicate, like GPS, in order to reclaim high level manufacturing jobs that have gone to other high-wage countries like Germany and Canada.

Zakaria points to China’s recent claim to the fastest computer in the world as an example of the ground we have lost as a consequence of lagging funding for technological investments. He believes massive Chinese government money in technology is the reason that they are ahead of us and are managing to grow and expand while the rest of the world suffers through the elongated recession.

If the U.S. government elected to make more careful investments, like the money put toward Global Position Satellites, the usages of which have continued to expand organically as private sector money is made, other expenditures in the name of job creation could be avoided.