Technology innovations have helped human society advance from the beginning. We've had all kinds of breakthroughs that have been game changers for us. From the simplest concepts such as the wheel, to complex solutions emerging today such as blockchain or quantum computing. We have hurdled one obstacle after another. Some problems though, seem to persist no matter what we do. Greed appears to one of those problems.
It is often said that greed can never be solved. It is baked into us, they say. Well, this is most undoubtedly true at some level. If we imagine early Homo Sapiens living in small groups or tribes, we can imagine the daily quest for resources. There were no grocery stores nor any money during this time. We would have been on the constant prowl for the necessary resources to sustain our daily lives and one can bet that when we found a treasure trove of vittles, we would have wrapped our arms around them like today's executives claim their multi-million dollar bonuses. We would have been incentivized by survival to be greedy.
The greedy survive. From an evolutionary perspective, people driven by greed would live and those not, would die during harsh times.
At some point, our little tribes would grow bigger and prosper due to our greed driven survival mechanisms. When tribes grew large enough, there would be different problems which would present themselves. We would find ourselves fighting more amongst ourselves. We would need laws to deal with this. We would need a trading solution, an abstraction layer, to help ensure people could get what they want even though they may not have possession of the right trading item. We would have needed to invent money. Our greedy survival skill would then follow the abstraction.
Over the course of human existence, greed would become known as a human characteristic. Is it really though? Is it really something that can't be changed or mitigated? If technology ultimately created greed, it would make sense then that greed could be dealt with using technology.
