What we think of as property, as ownership, is about to change. We're seeing rental licenses like Divx, which only failed because the machines were overpriced. . Jim Phelps's tape in Mission Impossible was an earlier harbinger of the read once license. The fact that the three components of a book have been broken apart means that there are great opportunities for wealth, in terms of selling the same content over and over and over again, and there are also great opportunities for abuse. I think the greatest threat to human condition is not my cheaper robots, but the end of property, when our books, records, videos, software can no longer be owned.
Civilization has states, just as matter does.
There is a very interesting thesis by Henry Plotkin, who tries to get Darwinism to operate at the level not just of individuals but of species, ecosystems, cultures and language. It is true that we can understand the states of culture and civilization as we understand dynamical systems. We see the acceleration both of culture and the communication of cultural change. It's faster than evolution of species. Human language has developed in the blink of an eye from the point of view of the species.