Will Corporate Capitalism be Fading Out?

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.

Everything's Booming, Almost

Mankind is going through a chain of booms. We've experienced the population boom, economies boom on and off, and most influentially the great technology boom. Additionally, there's been a data boom, a communication boom, and it can even be ventured to say we're beginning an ethics boom. What's missing?

Let's talk about a few things mentioned above. Population and economy are discussed extensively enough in other sources. What is this technology boom though? It's not as clearly defined, nor are it's ramifications. We know computers were invented only a handful of decades ago, and they've evolved at an exponential rate since then. What does this mean for us? Well, according to some sociologists, cultures merge from the technology of their peoples. This seems accurate enough, it's observable today, especially in the first world, but our technology has also lead to a globalized economy as companies spread across multiple nations, countries and their people communicate over the internet, Google creates a map of the entire planet. This leads to impacts on third world countries, and their cultures have been influenced slightly. Throughout the connected world, people are demanding more things, things like more jobs, more food, more connectivity, more rights, things that we didn't need to emphasize on as much before our population boomed. How do limited resources and large numbers of people influence culture? Let's just ask al-Shabab.