David Eagleman, speaking on “Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization“:
I talked a few steps ago about the retention of knowledge and the speed of spreading knowledge but what I’m really talking about here is the creation of knowledge. And I’d like to be able to come up with a better term than crowdsourcing which, as I mentioned, uses less than 1% of the population working on these problems. Since there will be problems in the future that we haven’t even thought of, in the face of that, what we want to do is maximize our problem-solving machinery. What I think we want to do as we democratize education is move from crowdsourcing really to something like ‘societysourcing’ where we’re getting 10%, 50% of the population involved with solving problems. It goes without saying that vast numbers of people on the planet will not take the opportunity to get an Ivy League education but, for the first time in history, it’s widely available. […] We need to get everyone involved with solving problems.
Across every industry and system of human society, this is where there is opportunity.