Where is our Master of Orion?

Last summer we discussed twin announcements from Intel and IBM/AMD about a new chip manufacturing technology dubbed high-k/metal gate. Intel is using the tech to improve speed and power consumption in its 45-nm chips. IBM, along with its manufacturing partners, just demonstrated chips it says show that high-k/metal gate technology at 32 nm can result in performance gains up to 30% and power savings up to 50%, compared to 45-nm process. IBM plans to be manufacturing 32 nm parts by the end of 2009. (AMD is not using high-k/metal gate yet, but it has access to the technology by virtue of its agreements with IBM.)

I read that article summary from Slashdot and one thing stuck out to me:

AMD is not using high-k/metal gate yet, but it has access to the technology by virtue of its agreements with IBM.

Holy smokes. Did anyone else get Master of Orion flashbacks? Regular articles are considering technologies as commodities. Something to be traded between races companies. I realize that companies have been trading "technologies" for a very long time. But this particular "high-k/metal gate" technology, is an actual technology in the true sense of the word. Developed independently by two different companies.

Imagine what would have happened if they had been working on different aspects rather than competing to the same technology. Looking at it from a Master of Orion viewpoint when we bump up our electronics research we get no more research points because they're all researching the same thing.

When you play Masters of Orion you get the sense that the whole race is working together to expand knowledge, and explore space. That there are teams of scientists inventing because that's what they're good at and what they produce is useful, to everyone. You probably didn't even imagine an internal currency for the planets you controlled. If the scientists wanted food the farmers would give it to them. If the factory workers needed ore the miners would get it for them. Not because they were paying internally but because they were working together as a whole. As a single race.

I have heard theories that the human race won't band together until it faces an outside threat. Perhaps any extraterrestrial societies are merely waiting for us to destroy ourselves. It seems rather likely, because we don't have our own... Master of Earth.

As I posit the position that the human race needs a leader, I'm not sure what that leader would be like. Enough humans don't want to be led, or wouldn't like the direction of leadership, that I might say it was impossible. But without it I think we will limp along slowly, and might destroy ourselves before we find something to band together about.