At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.
Trade between human groups has been going on for a 100,000 years. Idea of Cultural Evolution is done through exchange- the habit of exchanging one thing for another, a unique human feature. This creates the momentum for more specialization, people working for each other. We all know little bits, but none of us know the whole.
3 days ago: No company would spend hundreds of millions over many years on a new break through drug if anyone could then copy it. ( You wrote about copyright in a way that makes me think you meant patents. )
ReplyDelete3 days ago: What if we scrapped all copyright laws and all patents. Instead the inventors would be given money from a global fund that determines the value of the invention to the whole of humanity and then give a generous share of resources, contacts and money to the inventor. The money would be paid into the fund by all the world citizens (Rich people have to give more than poor).
So if you would create a new "Shooter video game" then sure, people will like it, but you won't get rich out of it because everybody is allowed to copy it and the "invention fund" would probably not give you a lot of rewards.
...So everybody would change their focus to creating the next "massive multiplayer elearning game" that's fun to play, because then the fund would reward you generously.
Of course, developing drugs takes many millions of dollars, but if everybody could copy it you would develop the next drug to cure AIDS and not the next drug to enlarge certain body parts.
Salim Zwein (+18)
2 days ago: utopian may I say ..you will have to face issues like : who decides of the value of inventions? it has been known all over the years that some apparently stupid inventions came to be quite handy later on ...so who decides and why? al this will lead to bias as our human nature does and oddly enough have the counter effect of what you are looking for: it will slow down the invention rate, because energy will be focused on how to get the best political tug over the "invention fund" to get the most out of it ...
Erik Honn (+5)
2 days ago: It's an interesting idea, but the devil is in the details. Like Salim said above me, who decides the values of an innovation? The problem with funds like this or with governments funding all research is that you concentrate all the decisions into a few people. You get authorities that decide if your idea is worth something or nothing.
But we know from history that its hard to predict just what the potential uses for new knowledge is, and as he has shown in this talk we need more people involved in these things, not less.
Despite this I still support the abolishment, or rather sever restriction, of patents and copyright. The current system limits innovation, it restricts technologies and ideas to certain people instead of letting the society has a whole improve on them. This is not the way forward.
Ari Melman (+5)
2 days ago: We need a capitalist model with some copyright laws to maintain growth at such a fast rate. However, there needs to be a multipronged advance in non-profitable but socially useful research as well as an open-source model for building off other's works.
For researching valuable inventions to humanity that may not neccesarily be profitable, Bill Gates is leading the way with his financing of Intellectual Ventures, a think tank that's solving world problems that lack financial support (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/06/21/bill-gates-very-full-life-after-microsoft/) They've created some incredible things, including antibiotics coolers that can preserve them for months without electricity.
Open Source and Creative Commons is leading the way on how copyright should be handled. Creators get profit and control, but allow people to build off and create more. The internet is speeding this up. Steam is a great company that uses open source. Older ones, such as pharmaceuticals will catchup
How well people are communicating their ideas. Collective Brain- We're just the nodes in the networks. Meeting and mating of ideas.
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