Cars and Guns, Germs, Steel

I just finished watching "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and I just finished reading "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

In the first, the seemingly superior invention of the electric car way back at the end of the 1990s was 'killed' and covered up by the automobile industries. The film points to car companies, oil companies, US government, and consumers (I think that's all) as those who should be responsible. And then we spent billions into developing the hydrogen fuel cell technology (and hybrids).

The latter one, talks about human history and some of the trends in different societies. One particular one caught my eye was that over millennia, constantly, there have been societies that have not adopted clearly superior technology (that was invented or imported) and reverted back to their old ones. The reason Jared Diamond offered is that those societies were so isolated (or in China's case, unified under one supreme ruler so early) that there was no competition whatsoever. In other societies, if one tribe doesn't adopt a new superior technology, they would either get assimilated, conquered, or massacred by the other tribes that did. In Europe, all the different countries had different rulers who had a lot of money to invest in different technologies; the superior ones stayed.

That brings to me to worry about the future of the increasingly converging 'developed' countries of the world. Our political leaders, business leaders, and even economic leaders are increasingly the same bunch of people (or people with the same kind of ideologies and paradigms). Are we becoming like the unified China before the modern age? Are we going to start killing all our new innovations because our leaders believe it is not in their (or their company's) interest to do so? How much power are we giving to these leaders to control our future? Is globalization the new isolation?