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The Global Silk Road: Globalization, Islam and the Creation and Distribution of Knowledge Using the Internet

by Chong Ju Choi, Brian John Hilton and Carla Millar

361 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); black and white images; catalogue #05-1437; ISBN 1-4120-6526-7; US$29.48, C$33.90, EUR24.21, £16.95

The role knowledge creation and distribution now plays in wealth creation as mankind evolves using Internet interconnectivity to emerge as the base element of the mind of the planet seen as the living entity, Gaia.

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About the Book

About the Author

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About the Book

This book develops an explanation of the social evolutionary processes generating human welfare on this planet. Increasingly land, labor and capital is being displaced by globally connected knowledge and understanding as the main productive resource driving growth.

The coordination required for this is global and self-organizing. It uses the Internet. This interpenetrates geo-political boundaries. Thus states are becoming irrelevant for wealth creation, social control or protection. The result is the emergence of a planet wide thought creation and distribution process with many features similar to those of the human brain.

This heralds a new era. Mankind can engage consciously in the evolution of this planetary brain. Each human is a neuron within it. The Internet's communication and computational technology provides connectivity. Inter connected human groups create this brains thought patterns and memories.

The processes involved are controlled by the interaction between creative individualistic forces and stabilizing communal forces. The first are epitomized by a society like the USA where individuality is supreme and the second by a country like China where communality is all.

Communality stimulates productivity but stifles creativity. The latter often leads to migration in search of freedom in social melting pots like the US. Modern global connectivity encourages physical production to move to communally based societies and value adding creativity to libertarian ones. The result is that the Internet now connects North East Asia with the West much as the Silk Road did in ancient times.

In creating knowledge costs are mainly fixed. They are those of initial creation not production. Unit costs fall the more one sells. DVDs, microchips etc can thus have very low prices. If distributed by the Internet these can be even lower. Selling globally to 6000billion at 10cents with costs at 3 is better than high prices in a local market. This encourages the global connectivity needed for the emerging global brain's maturation.

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About the Author

Brian Hilton now lives part of the year in Australia and the rest in North America and Europe. He is a committed systems thinker. He is an optimist about the future of humanity and its planet. He has been a public servant in Britain and an academic in both the UK and Australia. He has a keen interest in defense and security matters. He now concentrates on writing and consultancy based on an integral perspective of globalization that uses a social evolutionary view informed by concern about global terrorism.

Chong Choi has been an academic for most of his working life at Harvard, INSEAD, Oxford, Cambridge and ANU. His time is now focused on business and writing especially in and about the creative arts and the increasing significance of North East Asia particularly China for world development. He has written extensively as an academic on matters to do with International Business and Creativity.

Carla Millar is Professor of International Marketing at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Previously she was a marketeer in a major multi-national and then active in the development and management of executive education throughout Europe especially in its emergent east. She lived and worked in the UK for many years as an academic, wife and mother and played an active role in the development of the International Business and Marketing communities of European scholarship.

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Excerpts

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Catalogue Information

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