When Arab Spring happened many were suggesting, heck even demanding, a Noble Peace Prize for the founders of Facebook and Tweeter. The argument was, their communication tools allowed people to rise above tyranny and corruption. OK, fine yes!
But anyone that has lived in Mid East (or Africa) knows not all revolutions end up well for the people. They later day revolutions were not exactly like French or American revolutions. The Shah of Iran was brought back to Iran under the guise of a popular revolution. It was to take Iran back from an eventual American style electoral democratic system, back to a dictatorial monarchy. Soon later the Shah declared a White (peaceful) Revolution -- which many later saw as a form of land grab for him and his cronies. The Russian revolution as well did replace a monarchy, but with a more oppressive regime.
But really if there is any company that deserves a Noble Peace Prize, IMHO, it is Google and it's founders. Google created an global information, information distribution revolution. Google organized the information on the net, and let people found their own truth. But it went step more. It educated people. It did that in governance, but also in science and technology; in agriculture, but also in mining.
Look when I was doing my PhD, I would spend at least 3 days a month in the library using very expensive databases available behind closed doors, reading online abstracts. When I found the 10 or 15 articles that seemed related to my work, I would spend hours chasing them down on thick stacks of conference proceedings or bounded journals (usually IEEE, ICCV, IJCAI, ACM, IJCV, SIAM and SPIE). Then I would spend even more time copying each and every article. At the end, I would get about 30 to 60 articles to read during that month. Today What would take me 3 days, I can do from my desk using Google Scholar in a matter of minutes in 30 Minutes, tops.
Thanks to google the pace of technical innovation went from the slow and steady snail pace to jack rabbit speed. What took me roughly 5 years, would now take someone 6 months. Take away Google, and the information infra structure it provides, and you will slow down the world and pace of human progress back down to half speed.
Therefore, if Knowledge is Power, then Google made power available to all, including the meek and the powerless. If the world did become flat, it was because Google flattened the barriers by what was previously unknown. Moreover, Google did it globally. Google took the knowledge just available to lucky few in the halls of great academia, and spread it to everyone including some bright kids, and future trail blazers living today in the middle of nowhere.
Now in my books, that's the kind of evolutionary revolution worth being noteworthy.
Cheers, E
