The Age of Asymmetry and Paradox

When Professor Georges Anderla, as a consultant to the OECD in the early 1970s, asserted that the nascent knowledge industry would matter as much or more than manufacturing or energy, his peers labelled the metaphor an inflated rhetoric. Yet already, momentous developments were taking shape in which Anderla was to play a proactive part. First, the National Science Foundation of the US endorsed his forecasting study and implemented the project of information technology indicators,...
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When Professor Georges Anderla, as a consultant to the OECD in the early 1970s, asserted that the nascent knowledge industry would matter as much or more than manufacturing or energy, his peers labelled the metaphor an inflated rhetoric. Yet already, momentous developments were taking shape in which Anderla was to play a proactive part. First, the National Science Foundation of the US endorsed his forecasting study and implemented the project of information technology indicators, published annually. The European Commission then created a tailor-made directorate for information management. In that capacity, Anderla conceptualised - and negotiated the status of - a trans-European data transmission network, code-named Euronet, a forerunner of the US-sponsored Internet. Anderla fostered cognitive sciences, in particular, computer-aided translation, and galvanised the growth of a web of interactive databases, by so doing, prodding European researchers and policy-makers to face up to American and Japanese inventiveness and healthy competition. Throughout his career, Professor Anderla's interests and writings ranged widely, from international invisible payments to science policy and from computer strategies to the new discipline of chaotics applicable to corporations and society alike. A graduate of Columbia University (MA and PhD) and the universities of Paris, Prague and Aix-en-Provence, Anderla alternated between government service and teaching. Lately, Anderla undertook, somewhat in the spirit of the late Jacques Derrida's 'deconstruction' philosophy, to re-examine in depth some key postulates and assumptions of modern geopolitics and the ups and downs of capitalism, as a prelude to setting forth a global agenda for developing low-income countries in businesslike partnerships with the West - a trail-blazing exercise through as yet unmapped 2000-plus world economics. Anthony Dunning trained as a mathematical physicist, worked in industrial research, was a research associate at Penn State University and then Director of Computing at what was then Teesside Polytechnic before joining the Directorate-General for Scientific Information and Documentation of the European Commission where he worked for thirty years. In this last period he worked as a line manager responsible for providing IT infrastructure and application services, as a senior project manager on the design, development and implementation of new IT systems (e.g. email, project management, remote access to services [including wireless], online document delivery) over wide areas. He also played a major role in the IT standards policy of the European Commission and in several committees and working groups to devise best IT strategies and to manage the co- ordinated introduction of new technology.