Monday, February 9, 2009

Radical evolution

It is said that evolution occurs slowly over hundreds of years. But I think evolution is occurring very fast in bouts. Evolution of the mankind, the societies and the organizations. First of all, where am I coming from? Having read "God's Debris" by Scott Adams sometime last year, I somehow believe what he envisages in his book. He says somewhere that as a cell in a body does not know the existence and the effect it has on the organism, similarly, the humans in the planet don't know the existence and the effect they can have on the planet. He goes on to tell that all the humans (equivalent to cells) will form a network and be able to direct the course of earthkind that will shape the planet (equivalent to organism) which in turn will shape the universe. We can see this formation of networks in the form of the internet and how it is changing the way people think, organise, form thought and take action. In the book "Year million"
(http://www.amazon.com/Year-Million-Science-Edge-Knowledge/dp/1934633054/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213445875&sr=8-1),
one of the author says about the future of humans as "a gigantic system of solar-orbiting structures to trap the sun's energy". Dougal Dixon speculates on continental drift and changes in the Earth's magnetic field. From such sources of ideas, I optimistically think that the humankind will evolve into something like this, rather than pessimestically saying that they will die maybe in a few thousand years. If that is the supposed vision of the human kind, then I think and also see the next change in the society and the organisations that will enable us to go to this vision. In the past, we have seen socialism where the government controls everything, today, we see capitalism and free markets, and I stick my neck out today to say that the future will see the very people in the society control everything. By this I mean that the people of the society will not elect leaders the way it is done now. Relevant people who consider that they should contribute for something will directly take part in that activity and contribute. People will hate organisations that make profit. People will kill the organisations that make profit by making them untenable. People will contribute to things they want to and they do it for free. Everything will be user generated and what initially is for profit will turn to non-profit and for the betterment of the society. This will make profit making organisations bleed to death. The word competition will not exist. Even today, with all the price wars and ever lower transaction costs, every organisation is finding itself in a harder position to survive everyday. Today, with the credit crisis, people are angry and are loathing people who make a lot of money, and who because of their greed brought everybody's world down. In the coming decades, more such crisis will be blamed on greedy people and a general thinking of "for non-profit" and "for betterment of society" will come. The "for profit" people will become outlaws and will be forced to live secretly away from the society. The only rule of economics that will stay is the definition of economics "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." The human behaviour will change, today's economic rules of demand and supply will not exist as the concept of price will disappear. In the past, there was one currecny: gold. Then there were hundreds of currencies. Then in 1990's a lot of countries joined together to form the Euro. There was a similar idea for Asia too. Today, the pound has crashed against the dollar. Britain would like to rethink the concept of joining the Euro(They would then have not lost out so much value). Cloud computing is in. The concept of storing everything you want in a third party system is in (Google's Picasa, gmail and G drive). All the data in the world is getting collected centrally. The point I am making is that we are in a phase of human evolution and transition where things are changing very rapidly and simultaneously. Things have got so worse being split that things are again getting together but in a much different way than before. This time unitedness is in the form of networks that are distributive and have the power to take on more faults without the whole system going down. This is the way I see it. The readers are free to agree or disagree to whatever I have said. This is just my hypothesis which cannot be proved. Only time will tell...

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