“The Wisdom of Crowds” and the colors of collective intelligence
Response to Tom Atlee
Acknowledging the reality of all you say re memes and markets and emergent properties, there is a fundamental property of markets that has, in my assessment, now made markets more of a risk than a benefit to humanity generally.
Markets cannot value real abundance of anything other than at zero. This is a profound issue in two different ways.
We now have the technical capacity of providing an abundance of all of the essential goods and services to everyone, yet there is not (nor can there be) any market incentive to deliver that essential abundance to those who need it. Worse, not only is there no market incentive to deliver abundance, there is actually a strong market incentive to prevent any abundance from forming.
This creates a vast and real injustice, when billions of people experience the reality that they are prevented from having the essentials of life simply to maintain the profits of large corporations and their shareholders.
We now have the technology to deliver an abundance of a large and expanding set of goods and services to every person on the planet, yet we are prevented from doing so by the incentives of the market, which now dominate our social and legal systems.
Thus it is clear to me that we need to go beyond markets.
If one looks at evolution, it is possible to characterise it as competition in action, but it is also possible to characterise all major advances in evolution as new levels of cooperative behaviour (with attendant stabilising strategies to prevent invasion by cheats).
It is clear to me that humanity is now poised at an inflection point, where it is possible to create a cooperative that empowers all individuals in the free exploration of the infinite possibility spaces available; and it is not yet a certainty that we will in fact take that path.
What is clear to me, is that markets, and market based memes are amongst the greatest dangers facing humanity.
Ted Howard NZ's Blog 