Now before we get all political, let me
make a few points: capitalism has done some pretty good things. It's
gotten us where we are today, roughly, but it has developed mankind
at a huge rate since the Industrial Revolution. The corporation model
has provided vast amounts of resources so that aspiring academics
could develop many of the great technologies we have today, either by
hiring scientists, engineers, developers, etc; or by creating the
economic basis by which our government was able to support such
research, take NASA for example.
However, capitalism has its dark sides
as well. As an entity that focuses more on profit than progress, the
development it has created has also been hindered by the same model
as competition stifles cooperation amongst researchers. Also, the
profiteering model is a very clear breeding grounds for corruption,
and companies will go to great lengths to protect their markets from
revolutionary designs that will be more ethical but challenge their
positions at the top. A particularly gruesome example of this is
when some major medical company attempted, and thankfully failed, to
copyright strings of human DNA that could be used for research to
fight disease.
So capitalism has some good, mainly in
that we needed it to get this
far, past tense. But the playing field is changing now. We live in a
world where kids can build nuclear reactors in their garages, and the
dissemination of technology and information is only increasing
exponentially. We live currently on the brink of 3D printing
technology, which in the next decade might be so accurate as to reach
the molecular level. That's the technology I want to talk about
today.
