In a book titled Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?, MIT scientists Henry Lieberman and Christopher Fry discuss why we have wars, mass poverty, and other social ills. They argue that we cannot cooperate with each other to solve our major problems because our institutions and businesses are saturated with a competitive spirit. But Lieberman and Fry have some good news: modern technology can address the root of the problem. They believe that we compete when there is scarcity, and that recent technological advances, such as 3D printing and artificial intelligence, will end widespread scarcity. Thus, a post-scarcity world, premised on cooperation, would emerge.
New Technologies Won’t Reduce Scarcity, but Here’s Something That Might
Many people believe that issues of scarcity can be solved by using more efficient production methods. But past experience tells us that super-efficient technologies typically encourage increased throughput of raw materials and energy, rather than reducing them. Therefore, efficiency is better understood as a rearranging of resources expenditures, such that efficiency improvements in one end of the world economy increase resource expenditures in the other end. The good news is that there are alternatives. The wide availability of networked computers has allowed new community-driven and open-source business models to emerge. A new mode of production is also emerging, which builds on the confluence of the digital commons of knowledge, software, and design with local manufacturing technologies. It can be codified as “design global, manufacture local,” following the logic that what is light (knowledge, design) becomes global, while what is heavy (machinery) is local, and ideally shared. Design global, manufacture local (DGML) demonstrates how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development, celebrating new forms of cooperation. As the global community becomes more aware of how their abundance is dependent on other human beings and the stability of environments, more and more will see commons-based businesses as the way of the future.