In the 1970’s, if you had a problem to solve, you could invite others to your office, write letters or make phone calls to bring minds together to help you. From a practical standpoint, you could bring maybe 5 or 10 of the best minds in your geographical area into one place, for a limited space in time, to synergize together.

Today, thanks to the internet, you can easily bring a million minds together to solve the same problem. These million minds do not have to travel to participate, so they are not on a time table. This is why the pace of change, world wide, is so fast. In fact, the pace of change is so fast, if you were to jump 10 years into the future, you would have the skills and knowledge of a child compared to others who have evolved to that time.

This poses a problem to our society. If the internet can bring millions of minds together, real time, then societies with large numbers of internet literate people will have an advantage coping with the fast pace of change. Additionally, societies that spend their energies looking for a way to work together will leverage these million minds to do great things and solve the un-solvable problems.

We in the United States do not have an advantage in numbers. I have read that there are more honor students in India than there are total students in the United States. The economic ramifications of our disadvantage in numbers of educated and internet literate people should be obvious.

Additionally, in the United States we spend our time looking for ways to differentiate ourselves from each other and from the rest of the world. Our focus is on divisive issues. Instead of celebrating our differences and leveraging our diversity, we try to destroy or eliminate anything that is different. This will be our undoing, if we cannot change.