Pondering the Big Picture
At his Open the Future blog, CRN's Jamais Cascio presents a look at "The Big Picture"...
You don't have to believe in incipient singularities to recognize that 2028 -- just twenty years from now -- will bear very little resemblance to 2008.A small cluster of rapidly-accelerating drivers promises to dominate the first quarter of this century. Each of these drivers, alone, has the potential to remake how we live; together, the likelihood of a fundamental transformation of our lives, our politics, our world, becomes over-determined. Moreover, these drivers are distinct but interdependent: each one exists and would be transformative on its own, but how it plays out -- and the choices we'll face when confronting it -- will be contingent upon how the other drivers unfold. Twenty years isn't a long time to make the needed changes to turn potential disaster into a new world; we have all of five US presidential terms -- maximum -- to completely transform, globally, every significant aspect of our material civilization.
Jamais offers a list of "drivers" that are of particular concern for him (and us):
- Climate Chaos
- Resource Collapse
- Catalytic Innovation (including molecular manufacturing)
- Ubiquitous Transparency
- New Models of Development
- The Rise of the Post-Hegemonic World
As Jamais says, currently this is just a list. But it will be an interesting and, hopefully, productive exercise over the next weeks and months to see if we can have a discussion to put these things in perspective, place them in a real world context, discover how they might interact, and begin finding ways to mold the future proactively instead of becoming its passive victims.
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog
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