Far away from our shores, generations of peoples who had lived all their lives in abject poverty are now enjoying the fruits of modern technology without going through the laborious processes other peoples went through so many years ago.
Take electricity generation, for instance, which used to require huge infrastructural capital expenditure such as generation power stations, cables and transmission lines, etc.
Today, just by getting photovoltaic panels houses or whatever they call them deep in rural Africa can get electricity and all that works on electricity.
So too in telecommunications. Previous peoples had to go to extreme lengths to carry voice telephony over cables that ranged over vast areas. Today, thanks to mobile telephony, all it needs is mobile phones and repeater antennas every so often and soon everyone is in communication.
These people have leapfrogged from the 16th Century to the 21st in a very short span of time.
It is called technological leapfrog.
We in Malta might think we are so much an advanced country we have no need of a technological leapfrog. But in fact we do have one and we are greatly benefiting from it.
Until some years ago, the fact we are an island required us to get anything we needed from abroad. And that meant, until the advent of planes, from the sea. As a result, Malta was an island and its outlook was completely insular.
But with planes, and even more with the advent of ICT, Malta has lost almost all its insularity. This can be seen wherever one looks around. People in Malta are today totally and all the time connected to the rest of the world.
The benefits are visible: those who want to be completely in touch with whatever is happening all over the world can do so. Those who want to get the latest processes can find them available. Those who want to sell and export can promote their wares all over the world.
This huge advance did not come about thanks to our prowess or enterprise but rather because of technological advances that have taken place all over the world and which have happened to benefit us perhaps more than they did to other peoples.
This also shows us the way forward. As a people and a country we must learn to benefit from technological developments especially those in the forefront of technological change and adopt them as quickly as possible. Any delays will directly impinge on our competitiveness.
We have seen, and can see quite clearly any day, that whenever our country, for any reason, delayed adopting a new technology, the whole country suffered. Whenever our country was quick to adopt higher standards than those adopted by our competitors, we all benefitted.
So can we ascribe the development we have seen in telecommunication, in the adoption of ICT and connectiveness.
We cannot rest on our laurels, the world moves on each day and new products come on stream every day. In many cases, lack of progress can be due to lack of investment but equally it may be due to lack of political will or an inability to take the bull by the horns and take the appropriate decisions.
When we look around us, and see the expansion and growth of the Maltese economy, especially the people from abroad who now flock to come and work here especially in the sectors at the forefront of technological change such as finance, banking, ICT and online gaming, to name but a few, we can see the over-arching benefits of technological leapfrog.
On the contrary, wherever we delay progress or cannot find the way forward, we are keeping the country backwards and impeding progress. A best case example of this is the absolutely unsustainable road network which apart from costing each one of us, and the country as a whole, days, weeks if not months in accumulated delays, is also hindering us from tackling this issue and bringing to bear new technological ways of tackling such issues. After all, we do not have to invent the wheel.