Competition in the information age
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.”
Aaron Swartz
In the old days, if you wanted an axe, it had to be built by hand. And if you wanted another axe the second axe had to be built with the same effort. But at some point in time humans started to build machines which could build axes (and many other useful items). By using these machines, the human effort needed to build goods could be reduced drastically. The development culminated in the invention of computers and robots, universal machines which could be used to produce arbitrary goods by just changing their software. Computers can also be used to automate cognitive tasks, i.e. to process information. The invention of computers and robots has increased human capabilities by many orders of magnitude. I want to explore in this chapter how our competitive system is impacted by these powerful inventions.
The speed at which a group (such as a company or a country) can learn is proportional to what the group already knows. An example: if you know how to build a microscope you can do biological research much faster than without it. This means that the group which knows more will learn faster than other groups which know less. Therefore if the available know how is kept secret by the different groups, it is only a question of time until the group with the initially largest know how will dominate all other groups. This mechanism explains the natural tendency for companies in the tech world to form large monopolies. It also explains why the economic gap between the developed world and the third world is widening. The mechanism works also on the individual level: some people have, thanks to their good and expensive lifelong education, increasingly complex and well paid jobs, where for many others only poorly paid jobs are left. Everything you learn early is a building block to learn more later and gives you an advantage.
With the advent of technology, not only the power of large groups (companies and countries) has increased but also the power of the individual and small groups. Today you can 3D print a functioning gun at home with plans downloaded from the internet. This leads to a disturbance of the power relations between large groups and small groups / individuals. In medieval times farmers could revolt against their lords with a pitchfork (which was not too bad even against a sword). Now you need an automatic weapon if you want to start a revolution against your government. Of course it is very problematic to have automatic weapons in the hands of citizens and this is why they are forbidden in most countries. Why don’t people in the U.S. simply trust their government and hand in their guns? The problem is that 1. even democracies allow subgroups to be suppressed and 2. democracies have a tendency to be transformed to dictatorships at some point in time. It is scary to realize that it is in many countries almost impossible nowadays for people to overturn their dictatorial governments: citizens are facing machine guns when throwing stones.
This conflict will get worse with technological development and the improved availability of information. When I was a child I had a large chemistry lab at home. Today it is almost impossible to get the necessary substances for experiments as governments are scared people will cook drugs or create explosives with them. The recipes for these things can be easily found in the internet.
So called „biohackers“ are playing with gene technology like CRISPR-Cas9 at home (using simple and cheap lab equipment) and this technology could be used to render extinct an entire animal species! Everybody can download quite advanced cyber weapons from the internet today. If this kind of knowledge is used in the wrong way by competing individuals or groups the consequences could be catastrophic for the whole world. This is why a competitive world needs strict control of such technologies on the level of individuals and of groups (like companies and countries). This will inevitably lead to an increasingly rigorous surveillance state. It is also a known fact that control on the level of countries does not work well: more and more countries are getting access to nuclear weapons in spite of strong international efforts to limit the spread of this technology.
The more our society turns into an information society, the more dangerous information can be. When everything is controlled by code, code can be a deadly weapon. This is not only true for computer code, but also for other kinds of information: social media content can be used as desinformation weapons. Viral information can turn citicens into weapons by making them distribute fake news and propaganda. This means everybody can today create weapons of almost unlimited power.
As long as we are competing with each other, we cannot live in a world in which everybody can create weapons of unlimited power. As a consequence, a total surveillance state seems to be unavoidable if we continue walking the current path.