IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 70

completely, changed her religion
and appearance, and made no
attempt to escape although she was
left alone long periods of time [21].
The world is a messy place.
Competition for survival often leads
to information wars where misleading and deceiving others to serve
your purpose is a common technique. Most of our existing information is distorted, or even downright
wrong, to serve such competitive
purposes of others. A great deal of
information is produced to influence others rather than to inform,
and such flooding of misinformation actually reduces our knowledge and insight, and ironically can
leave everybody worse off. Consider spam email. So much of it is
produced because it pays to send
spam email, since the receivers pay
the cost of sorting through large
numbers of irrelevant and even
fraudulent emails. Economists call
this an externality when others pay
part of the cost of your economic
benefit. But when everybody sends
spam to everybody else, everybody
is worse off when email becomes
unusable, with a great deal of lowquality information overwhelming
the receivers and blocking highquality information.
Information may merely inform
and give options, but economics often creates necessities and
forces action. Information easily spreads and becomes available
to your competitors, so if it produces any short term advantage, it
forces acting on that information.
Consider the nuclear race during
and after World War II. The possibility of nuclear bombs and the rudimentary knowledge to build them
developed during the war by both
parties. Neither party could possibly ignore that information, and
refuse to develop the bomb, knowing that others may do so. In the
process, the information eventu-

ally left everybody worse off, some
by being targeted or threatened by
them, others with nuclear weapons
aimed at each other.
Consider agriculture, which
may have changed what it means
to be human. Archeologists have
discovered prehistoric skeletons in
Dickson Mounds, IL, that show that
the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture may have had
serious negative consequences for
humans, such as 50% increase in
malnutrition and 30% increase in
infectious diseases. Stone-age people may have lived healthier lives
than the agricultural people that
came after them [22]. Why then
would they make the switch? They
may have had no choice once the
information was acquired, because
agriculture gives you a short-term
competitive advantage, but leaves
ever yone worse off eventually,
similar to the weapons systems,
because agriculture allows people
to control other people's access
to food and exploit other people's
labor. The race to exploit others,
and not to be exploited, cannot
easily be opted out of. In previous
hunter-gatherer societies, the food
was distributed widely, not concentrated geographically, so it was
not possible to control others' food
supply. Agriculture concentrated
the food supply and fixed it geographically, so the people became
dependent on a specific plot of
land, once they invested their time
and labor. Such concentration and
immobility encouraged the exploitation of those dependent on that
plot of land, by those with ownership rights to that plot of land.
Warfare followed invariably to
establish ownership rights. In fact,
when anthropologist Jane Goodall
took some peaceful chimpanzees
from their natural hunting-gathering
habitat, and started feeding them
from a central location, incessant
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

violence broke out among them
almost immediately to gain access
to the limited but centralized food
source [22].
Overall human health and longevity may have taken a severe
hit from agriculture. "The typical
human diet went from extreme
variety and nutritional richness to
just a few types of grain and occasional meat and dairy. In addition
to the reduced nutritional value of
the agricultural diet, the diseases
deadliest to our species began their
rampage with agriculture. High density populations stewing in their
own filth, domesticated animals in
close proximity, adding their excrement, viruses, and parasites to the
mix, and extended trade routes
facilitating the movement of contagious pathogens. Waorami Indians
of Ecuador had no hypertension,
heart disease, cancer, anemia, or
common cold; no parasites, polio,
pneumonia, small pox, chicken
pox, typhus, typhoid, syphilis,
tuberculosis, malaria, or hepatitis.
Most of these diseases either originated in domesticated animals, or
depend on a high-density population for transmission [8], [22].
Similar arguments apply to
modern information intensive conflict and warfare. They also leave
everyone worse off eventually, after
protracted wars, insurgencies, revolutions, and terrorism. Yet, we can't
get away from them because of the
great short-term advantages they
confer to the winners. Israel would
have been better off paying the Palestinians for their land and resettling them, instead of driving them
into refugee camps, and instigating
sixty years of warfare and terrorism. The U.S. would have been better off without the African slaves in
the long run, by avoiding a bloody
civil war, and the 200 year struggle to remedy the damage done by
slavery. But, there is a tremendous
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december 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015