The Era of CCC - Part 3 : Collaboration

The third C is for collaboration in it's purest form, between every single human being on the planet and traversing all fields where more collaboration is possible. Artists working together through the network, scientists sharing their data and results freely, software tools available to and built by all. An open source worldwide community where everything, or almost, is available to all. 

I say open source because it is the closest parallel I can make to something that already exists. Dozens, hundreds and even thousands of individuals working to perfect the code of a single piece of software, preventing bugs and security flaws before they become an issue for the population at large that uses it. People with nothing specific to gain from it, other than a bit of acknowledgement and the great satisfaction they get from contributing to the community.

If this principle were to be applied to other fields, such as scientific research, what could happen? If, instead of dozens of different laboratories competing to be the first to discover a marketable cure for AIDS or a smaller processor, the scientific community were to unify its worldwide talents into a single force capable of solving this world's problems... What would become of us? 

I believe that we would accelerate our development exponentially, assuming of course, as according to my previous posts, we were to remove the need for individuals to work to survive by replacing menial tasks by automation and artificial intelligence.

This would be especially true in the pharmaceutical field (and others I'm not aware of I'm sure) where different companies all struggle to be the first to create a pill to fix each ailment of the human race. If, instead of having 4 different colors of pills to get a hard-on, they were to work together on making one of each (the best, we hope), so much more would get done.

Of course, complete collaboration in fields other than art is somewhat impossible in the current state of affairs. In a capitalist society one cannot spend resources on creating something that doesn't benefit them personally since everyone works hard for their money. Perhaps communism wasn't such a bad ideas after all - it was just badly implemented!

Right now, collaboration works well with both arts and software. In both cases it's because acknowledgment and reputation precedes cold hard cash in the order of priorities, or at least until one is known an appreciated enough to make it on their own. It's more intuitive this way. 

Stay tuned on Wednesday for the 4th and final part, the conclusion. In the meantime, what do you think we could achieve with perfect collaboration between individuals in this world?