Collaboration
Before the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, humanity spoke one language. They aspired to reach the level of God and began building a tower to make it to Heaven until God intervened:
God came down to look at the city and tower, and remarked that as one people with one language, nothing that they sought would be out of their reach. God went down and confounded their speech, so that they could not understand each other, and scattered them over the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city.
God knew that separate languages and scattering people would stratify the human race and undermine our ability to cooperate and thus slow us down. In many ways, the story of technology is our way of crawling back from this discord back toward a more connected humanity. All of our advances in tech have led us closer together to speaking the same language and being more connected geographically (the so called ‘global village’). First speech, then art, telegraphy, telecommunications, and eventually telepathy will bring our collective minds closer together. These advances toward a more cohesive existence, capable of communicating in real time across the globe have facilitated exponential growth in the powers of humanity. We are coming back together, and this has allowed us to dominate the earth:
Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or wolf, but because Homo sapiens is the only species on earth capable of co-operating flexibly in large numbers… Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. — Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus
Networks
We have seen how our increased abilities of perception and the speed and flow of information has transformed our ability to remedy and change the world in ways once thought unimaginable.
A tribe connected through the use of language to create a network of individual minds to share information among each other. Eventually, when we scattered out of Africa 70,000 years ago we had to come up with ways to communicate with far off bands of people. We created networks of roads with an addressing system to communicate between villages. Now we have increased the speed at which we can communicate long distances through the invention of telegraphy, radio and the internet.
With this increased network among strangers, trust becomes a major issue in our ability to cooperate.
Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. — Sapiens
Humans are social in many ways because we have to be social. We are quite ironically born without the ability to live (without extensive help). Other animals pop out of the womb more mature. It takes humans years and years to reach even the level of maturity to take care of oneself.
Specializing
Our ability to collaborate naturally lends itself to specialization. We used to be more Jack of All Trades or Renaissance Men, but now you’re more likely to make money knowing the best way to compress a .json file than know how to hunt, kill, strip and cook a deer.
We are far more specialized — with abstraction I don’t have to know how to fix my toilet, because I can call a plumber if I’ve got an issue.
In The Knowledge Illusion, authors Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach discuss how we delude ourselves into knowing more than we actually do. They describe a study at the University of Liverpool, where researchers simply asked people to fill in the missing parts of a drawing of a bicycle. Despite the simplicity and ubiquitousness of bikes, only half the people drew something correct. They also showed them 4 pictures of bikes and a similar amount didn’t know.
The authors explain:
people are more ignorant than they think they are. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meager.
This overconfidence stems from the fact that we think in ‘hives’ — we feel like we know more than we do because we have a network of people around us that do. Our bike just works, so why do we need to know exactly how? If it breaks, we’ll take it to a shop.
A beehive is often considered a model of cooperation in nature, with each bee having a very special role in the ecosystem that can’t survive without each individual part.
A honey bee colony typically consists of three kinds of adult bees: workers, drones, and a queen. Several thousand worker bees cooperate in nest building, food collection, and brood rearing. Each member has a definite task to perform, related to its adult age. But surviving and reproducing take the combined efforts of the entire colony. Individual bees (workers, drones, and queens) cannot survive without the support of the colony.
This makes each piece of the ‘team’ significantly more valuable, and our increased synergy as a human race has exponentially accelerated our progress.
The Internet
Collaboration using computers had been a concept conceived since the beginning of computing. One of the early people of this field, Vannevar Bush, pioneered thinking about connected systems of indexed and organized information, partly through a device he called the Memex.
The concept of the memex influenced the development of early hypertext systems (eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web) and personal knowledge base software.
Those theoretical roots led to the actual early development of the beginnings of the internet that can be traced back to the 1960s and the government agency DARPA. It was developed to link university research papers across the country and was called ARPANET. It laid the foundations for the modern underpinnings of the internet, with packets of data, decentralized networks and utilization of physical infrastructure, such as existing phone lines. The emergence of other networks also led to the creation of standards, for how traffic between these networks should be addressed and laid out. These communication protocols like IP and TCP helped the ARPANET eventually transform into the internet we use today, starting in the early 1980's.
The Web
Internets are everywhere. Your company may have its own internet. And the early days of the internet in the 1980’s were like the wild west. Users connected to many different systems like USENET groups, BITNET and several other disconnected networks. There was Gopher, Archie, FTP and email but no standard, most popular way to use interconnected computers. In 1989, Tim Berners Lee began creating the World Wide Web, which would become and is to this day the most popular way to connect to the internet and is so dominant, it is interchangeable with the phrase the internet. He described his creation:
“Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked. There would be a single global information space. A web of information would form.”
Berners-Lee insisted that the Web protocols should be made available freely, shared openly, and put forever in the public domain. After all, the whole point of the Web, and the essence of its design, was to promote sharing and collaboration.
Berners-Lee created Uniform Resource Locators, those ‘URLs’ such as http://www.medium.com. the www means world wide web. It’s what your’e connected to. He also invented the hypertext linkage system in which links were set up to connect different files to each other in a similar way to how the brain makes linkages between related information. He invented so much of what we seem to think of as second nature-URLs, HTTP, and HTML. He got his system funded at CERN and it exploded after its creation and release on August 6th, 191. And with the creation of internet browsers to find information amongst this vast ‘web’ of information, the internet as we know it today was born.
Social
Collaboration created the internet, which in turn has created an entirely new platform on which to collaborate (exponential) and opened up channels for anyone to create and share content. Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Google and Amazon all owe a supreme debt to his Berners-Lee keeping his system open for anyone to use without license. This, along with Richard Stallman’s creation of the GNU license allowed for the creation of vast libraries of open source software. In What’s the Future, Tim O’Reilly describes a group who wanted to recreated the popular Unix operating system:
They had created every piece, except the Kernel. This is where a young man named Linus Torvaldes came in. In 1991, he posted on a Usenet user group about a ‘hobby’ he was working on, which was the Linux Kernel. Developers around the world started contributing code to the project and its popularity exploded. Torvaldes soon licensed it under the GNU license.
With his creation out there in the world, Torvaldus needed a technical infrastructure on which this mass collaboration could be carried out. In 2005, a technology called BitKeeper started charging for its use, so Linus and the maintainers of his Linux Kernel sought alternatives and ‘Git’ was created. Wikipedia’s definition:
Git is a version control system for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people.
The collaborative tool opened up by the internet fostered more collaboration through Berners-Lee’s world wide web, which spread and helped create other platforms like Github, Wikipedia and Slack which compound exponentially our ability to work with each other.
Much like the shared papers across Europe ignited the Scientific Revolution. (this is just faster, more access, more real time). A white paper, like that describing bitcoin can be published and immediately accessed by anyone, anywhere in the world.
Will we soon speak one language again?
