Any man-made systems are bearing their limitations, due to
the limitations of human. Therefore, these systems will run down eventually
just a matter of time. The evidence can be found in the stream of human
civilizations, let alone the man-made computer systems. This includes the
man-made social systems and structures. To survive, we need continuous evolution
and revolution. The current revolution towards Digital Age can be considered as
a case in line.
Our current economic, financial, and social structures are
mostly established to suit Industrial Age, which are distorting in Digital Age.
For example, the stock markets were established to connect investors with
businesses for their investments to business growth, and to benefit from such
activities. However, the stock trading becomes the major business of its own
since the online-trading was born in 90s, and the trading techniques and tools
are improving continuously with Internet and digital technology advancement. We
can see that the trading volumes dramatically increased since 90s, and began to
decrease after 2009 recession. However, the financial engineering stayed in its
milestone scales, due to government rescue. Gradually, the economic scale in
financial engineering surpassed the one in Main Street productions, which caused
and worsened wealth divide, since the rich people have more spare money to
participate in financial engineering. In our capitalism system, people are
chasing capital gains naturally, doesn’t matter it’s from Main Street or Wall
Street.
This trend has to be broken for the society to be productive
again. The current trend of connected digital world with shared economies,
shared infrastructures, shared resources, and shared knowledge is shining the
light for making this to happen. We may have to go through a dark period of
time before dawning, such as in current stagnated world economy. The important
thing is that we should know the direction we are heading to, and to build into
it.
We need visionary leaders in this world!