The global stock market will have to arise at some point. Part of this whole move forward in knowledge exchange. I think the world wants this, inherently, because having a perfect exchange of knowledge across all, gives everyone benefit. Even those who broker in knowledge these days and commit constantly to secrecy, will, in the long term, move away from the senseless holding back of knowledge because the potential for economic benefit (which will turn into social/lifestyle benefit as well) in a far more efficient world will dwarf the possibilities today. And those people who are intelligent enough to find and harbor the finer points of knowledge today, will probably be the first to grasp the value of all of the data out there in those times.
As questions continue to come up on a constant basis there need to be answers generated in order for corporations and governments down to the micro-business of a single person running their own marketing with outsourcing across three continents. In our brave new world the power will not be in who has the knowledge, because we all will, but who actually does something with this knowledge. Making sense of it all becomes much easier as you begin to invest yourself in your field over time. Your local data center (your brain) will begin to store more and more information that is important to you as you continually browse for more knowledge during your daily business tasks. In this sense…the knowledge exchange becomes the hard drive of the world where the RAM of a computer becomes the human element. We become the sheep herders of knowledge.
Trading in facts.
Maybe, at first, large groups will have control of the data (at first no one, then maybe pharaohs, religious people, the church, the government, the corporation today) and the exchange of large chunks of data will drive the economic markets of the future as a group with the ability to gain more knowledge would seem most to benefit from changes in the world (as there is always benefit and loss to be found in all exchanges). Possibly later on, the controllers of the data will gain the ability to gather and store more than is being created in the world and that ability will slowly filter down from single gigantic units somewhere to many smaller more nimble and interactive smaller groups (computer moved from a few key government facilities to many large universities to many large corporations then to smaller business and finally to the millions of homes where it then exploded changing everything above it) who will alter the landscape toward this knowledge utopia.
Maybe we will all die before we reach that point. I hate to conceive that all that we have worked for as a species would only be left for later archeologists to hypothesize upon.
