Hurry Up, Turkey—4.0 is Coming!

In my previous articles, I have mentioned industrial revolutions several times. 

I tried to explain the logarithmic and numerical connection of the progress humanity has made in the last 10,000 years, and especially in the last 300 years.

Many people searched for, asked about, and thanked me for it.

They said that instead of learning about the last three hundred years by reading dozens of books, they learned it briefly from our articles.

In a previous article, I also tried to explain the topic of “Why did Turkey miss these Industrial Revolutions and why did it miss the last one as well?”

Historians have clearly demonstrated why we missed the first industrial revolution in 1750 and the second in 1850.

Thank God, there is no one left among us who does not know how the Harbiye, Mülkiye, and Tıbbiye schools, which the Turks established to hold onto life and keep pace with the modern world, were seized by narrow-minded people and dragged into a medieval mindset.

The July 15 coup attempt taught us all, under the shadow of bombs, what the relationship between religion and state affairs should be.

Like the saying that those who do not learn from reprimands deserve a beating, it made us count the stars. 

From now on, if we manage the relationship between merit, education, nepotism, and the military-politics-science nexus within the framework of reason, we will prevent other July 15s,

Even if there is not much hope for it.

On the other hand, while approaching these processes, it should not be overlooked that those who provide the advice are “unrefined converts.”

Nowadays, we are taking advice from unrefined converts.

Recently, on a national channel, Grand Master Olivier Roy was giving us advice.

And he was connecting all the way from France.

He was explaining how the Religion-State relationship in Turkey should be.

He was complaining about imams not being free and the oppressive structure of the Diyanet.

And the questions are being asked by our Francophone television host, whose French is clearly very good.

We already missed the industrial revolutions with the advice given by people like Olivier Roy.

Specifically,

I had tried to explain simply why we missed Industry 4.0 through the examples of professors Hakan Türeci and Özlem Türeci.

Professor Hakan Türeci sent me a message.

I made a mistake on some points.

He is not a graduate of METU Physics, but a graduate of Bilkent Physics.

He is not a professor in the Physics Department at Princeton University, but in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Princeton University.

But there was no problem with the main framework.

That is, it is true that he ranked highly in the university entrance exams (ÖSS-ÖYS) in 1990.

It is true that while he could have entered Hacettepe English Medicine or Boğaziçi Economics or Computer Engineering, he chose the lower-scoring Bilkent Physics.

It is true that he did his PhD in Physics.

It is also true that he became a scientist in America, not in Turkey.

Based on this, we have lost almost all of our children who ranked in the top thousand over the last 40 years.

We made our brightest ones doctors, engineers, and business administrators.

Then, we made the ones who were left over into scientists.

And we lost our good scientists to our competitors.

In fact, biologically, nature can only produce a thousand super-brains from a population of 60-70 million.

If you do not direct them toward science, and if you lose those you do direct to the competition, you are doomed to be a subcontractor.

Thank God we did not become laborers.

A subcontractor, even if it is in the form of a station, is at least a single-core living species that possesses a certain amount of capital, has the potential to carry out the directives of its owner, and can dream, even if only in one dimension.

A laborer, on the other hand, is a living species that works and lives day-to-day, has no forward-looking plans or dreams, and acts only with the feelings of nutrition, shelter, reproduction, and protection.

Fortunately, because we held onto the second-tier thousands, we had the luxury of being subcontractors. 

Because we directed these second and third-tier thousands toward technique instead of science and knowledge, our subcontracting system became quite deep-rooted.

Even though we were wounded, we knew how to emerge from every crisis.

However, if we had directed our top thousands over the last forty years toward the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, and eliminated their anxiety about life under state guarantee and in a performance-based manner,

If we had offered them financial means in their pockets to use unquestioningly for a lifetime,

If we had established research centers where those brains could work comfortably,

If we had eliminated the sensitivities that primitive beings think about, such as homes, cars, children's futures, health, and vacations,

If we could have made the science incentive system work,

We would have raised our own Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Pages, Sergey Brins, and Mark Zuckerbergs, each worth three hundred billion dollars today.   Since our duty on earth is not this, but subcontracting, it was not us, but other countries that raised these names. If we continue with the “imported wisdom” of the Francophones, we will both continue to lose the brains that nature has bestowed upon us to the foreigners, and we will miss many more industrial revolutions.