Could a computer game save us from a global pandemic? It might sound unlikely but scientists in America have been tracking the path of an infectious disease through World of Warcraft, a game played by some 9m people around the world.

One thing scientists can’t usually build into computer models is human unpredictability – which seat you choose on the bus or which shop you enter to buy your morning newspaper might determine whether you pick up a cold.

In WoW, players create an avatar of themselves and move around at will. Two years ago the game’s creators decided that anyone attacking the winged serpent Hakkar the Soulflayer would be infected by his corrupted blood, potentially losing several hundred points in the game. Even standing too close to Hakkar could cause infection. Newer players could be killed in seconds.

Before WoW’s creators realised what they’d unleashed, a full-blown epidemic had broken out. But if it was a problem for them it was a boon for medical science researchers. They realised that this online world had accidentally been converted into a virtual laboratory where for the first time they could study the spread of a disease – without anyone actually contracting it.

If the idea of computer games defending us against a pandemic sounds futuristic, that’s because the future is arriving earlier than predicted – according to Don Tapscott, the Canadian “cyberguru” who coined the term the Net Generation. The next big thing is Wikinomics, he says, and he is being taken so seriously that Barack Obama, the US presidential challenger, has a Wikinomics working group.

A wiki is no more than a piece of software that allows thousands of people to edit the same website. It’s what they do with it that has extraordinary possibilities. We always knew that two heads were better than one, but 200m heads could be much, much better, according to Tapscott. “If people from all over the world can get together to create an encyclopedia – Wikipedia – that’s a challenge to Encyclopaedia Britannica, what can’t they create?” Software, a mutual fund, new medicines, the means to reverse global warming? Yes to all the above, he argues, citing the example of his neighbour Rob McEwen, who ran a goldmining company on 55,000 acres only to discover that his expert geologists couldn’t tell him where to dig. So he decided to do a little online prospecting, putting up $500,000 in prize money for anyone to tell him where to mine for gold. Ideas came not just from geologists but from students, mathematicians and military officers. The worth of McEwen’s company went from $100m to $9 billion.

The point is, says Tapscott, that your own experts don’t always know the answers – but if you go “open source”, if you’re prepared to collaborate, you will find someone who does. Wikipedia, he says, illustrates the new dynamics perfectly. Companies are now realising that many of their products can be created and developed – outside the company. It’s called “crowdsourcing”, a kind of speculative outsourcing to the masses. Procter & Gamble began looking for a molecule to remove red wine stains from clothing. Instead of turning to its own research and development department, it created a website called InnoCentive where scientists from anywhere in the world could look at this problem (and scores of others) and be paid for coming up with solutions.

“Are they going to find the solution with the 9,000 chemists they have in the company or with the 1.5m that the web connects them with?” Tapscott asks. “It will be the retired chemist in Taipei or the graduate student in London who gets the $100,000 from P&G – while P&G get the fabulous new product.”

Similarly, an “open-source motorcycle company” in China has seen hundreds of small firms, each making different parts, collaborate online and meet in tea-houses, rapidly become the biggest motorcycle company in the country. Believers in the “old paradigm”, says Tapscott, are still arguing about the accuracy of user-generated entries in Wikipedia, while missing the real cultural shift that is taking place.

Tapscott is visiting London to announce that 30 governments worldwide, including our own, have each invested $150,000 in “Government 2.0”, an online experiment in collaborative democracy. The ambition is to see if a new kind of “digital conversation” can throw up solutions to the apparently intractable problems facing the 21st-century world – and to revitalise the relationship between government and people. The guru of Wikinomics is optimistic.

“It may turn out that the killer application from mass collaboration may actually be saving the planet,” he muses. “It was Mark Twain who said that everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it – but now we really need to do something about it and maybe we can find the solution together online. Maybe this smaller world our children will inherit can still be a better one.” Maybe science fiction can really become science fact.

Wikinomics, Atlantic Books, £16.99

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