Trade, commerce and the cloud = less violence, more innovation, more cooperation

[True Earthling]

Collective idea sharing through trade and commerce spurred progress and laid the foundation for cooperation between competing societies. The internet and cloud computing will propel us further down that road.

Interesting article by evolutionary scientist Matt Ridley..

Knowledge is dispersed and shared. Friedrich Hayek was the first to point out, in his famous 1945 essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society," that central planning cannot work because it is trying to substitute an individual all-knowing intelligence for a distributed and fragmented system of localized but connected knowledge. I find that the entire field of anthropology and archaeology needs Hayek badly. Their debates about what made human beings successful, and what caused the explosive take-off of human culture in the past 100,000 years, simply never include the insight of dispersed knowledge. They are still looking for a miracle gene, or change in brain organization, that explains, like a deus ex machina, the human revolution. They are still looking inside human heads rather than between them.

That is what trade does. It creates a collective innovating brain as big as the trade network itself. When you cut people off from exchange networks, their innovation rate collapses. Which is of course why the Internet is such an exciting development. For the first time humanity has not just some big collective brains, but one truly vast one in which almost everybody can share and in which distance is no obstacle.

The political implications are obvious: that human collaboration is necessary for society to work; that the individual is not—and has not been for 120,000 years—able to support his lifestyle; that trade enables us to work for each other not just for ourselves; that there is nothing so antisocial (or impoverishing) as the pursuit of self-sufficiency; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress.

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/ancient-cloud

Echoed by Harvard Psychology Professor Steven Pinker in his recent article Violence Vanquished...

Another pacifying force has been commerce, a game in which everybody can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism.

For example, though the relationship today between America and China is far from warm, we are unlikely to declare war on them or vice versa. Morality aside, they make too much of our stuff, and we owe them too much money.

http://goo.gl/EKOw7

[StandingInLeftField]

1. Long term....maybe,

Short term.....not so much.