A better example might have been the nuke … once the ideas are out there, eventually everyone acquired them.

The only differential is the period at which only the inventor or a select few has them, but the knowledge seeks to be freely dispersed.

Not true, at least in the short run. An example–the renunciation of firearms by the Japanese. It seems like the main reason this didn’t last in the long run was that others still had firearms. What would have happened if Japan had been the sole owners of that technology?

Technology can, in fact, be controlled. It’s up to individuals to band together to ensure that it isn’t. There just isn’t any magic.

Actually lately it’s been Stephenson’s Anathem (a few months ago), Card’s Ender In Exile, re-reading Herbert’s “God Emperor of Dune” (which has some great philosophical parts, worthy of a separate post, which I didn’t really grok when I was a kid) and some totally unrelated and irrelevant Neil Gaiman — most of those dealing with longer term plannings of things on a very large scale, as well as the ability of very small groups of people to cause very large impacts.

That coupled with listening to a lot of product sales pitches in a short interval made me wonder whether much of the work we do, long since strayed from academics (and academics itself straying too far from pragmatism or deep relevance in many circles), has such longstanding contribution and influence. That, and knowing what we think we know about community dynamics and how they might apply to larger systems (i.e. governments), would it be safe to think of us as more interested in the latter problem than the former problem of the short term product lifecycle? I was also struck by a C-level exec’s comment (not my company, of course) I heard recently — “We’re so concerned with 6 month short-term roadmaps we can’t even think about the future”. Sadness. The future I want to think about is the future far past my lifetime, and what we can do today to help shape that future. Capitalism and traditional corporate focus on stock performance (see also: oil) doesn’t seem to like long-term. How to reconcile that?

I’m sure the world is changing — it always is — though I think we lack the data to ensure it’s changing as we like and need to better understand how we can shape it, or rather what we do is ultimately just influence in a microcosm.
(Yet, as I’ve said, we’ve got to eat too).

It might be safe to say though that things are clearly breaking away from small feudal regions of power to larger entities, which does hopefully trend towards globalness and the irrelevance of those barriers if allowed to go the course.
One can hope. That’s our path to enable what science fiction so frequently talks about — if this industry can be the ones to show governments (and other industries) that path, perhaps we have a chance.

If so, this means what we are doing /is/ playing a kind of instructive game about the second derivative of information. If I could insert a pun, perhaps we’re trading futures!

Of course, if this is all B.S., efforts may be better applied elsewhere. Not sure.