State of the Future

From a press announcement...

Many people still do not appreciate how fast science and technology (S&T) will change over the next 25 years, and given this rapid development along several different fronts, the possibility of technology growing beyond human control must now be taken seriously, according to a new report.

The State of the Future 2005 report is produced by the United Nations University's Millennium Project - a global think tank of foresight experts, academics and policy makers. It analyses current global trends and examines in detail some of the current and future challenges facing the world.

Setting the scene, the report states: "Future synergies among nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science can dramatically improve the human condition by increasing the availability of food, energy and water and by connecting people and information anywhere. The effect will be to increase collective intelligence and create value and efficiency while lowering costs."

However, it warns that "a previous and troubling finding from the Millennium Project still remains unsolved: although it is increasingly clear that humanity has the resources to address its global challenges, unfortunately it is not increasingly clear how much wisdom, goodwill and intelligence will be focussed on these challenges."

That is a sobering thought. CRN agrees that efforts to anticipate and effectively prepare for the revolutionary impacts of new technologies must not be allowed to fall behind the speed of technical advances.

The report argues that because the factors that caused the acceleration of S&T are themselves accelerating, the rate of change in the past 25 years will appear slow compared to the rate of change in the next 25 years. "To help the world cope with the acceleration of change, it may be necessary to create an international S&T organisation to arrange the world's science and technology knowledge as well as forecasts of potential consequences in a better Internet-human interface," it argues.

We support this call for an international science and technology organization. This body perhaps could be a forerunner of, or at least associated with, CRN's recommended global administration network for advanced nanotechnology.

[Regarding] the wider challenges facing humanity, the report notes that national decision makers are rarely trained in the theory and practice of decision making, and argues that advanced decision support software could help. 'Formalized ethics and decision training for decision makers could result in a significant improvement in the quality of global decisions,' it concludes.

Both ideas -- decision support software, and ethics and decision training for global leaders -- would be highly valuable.

As a consultant to the UN University's Millennium Project, I was involved with developing some of the findings contained in this report. In general, it will be a very helpful document for many people.

The main area where CRN would like to see additional impetus is in studying and preparing for the societal implications of distributed general-purpose molecular manufacturing. Some of our urgings found their way into the report -- for which we are grateful -- and we hope to see broader and deeper discussion of these issues as time goes by.

Mike Treder

Comments

[MysticMonkeyGuru]

"Many people still do not appreciate how fast science and technology (S&T) will change over the next 25 years."

Baloney. Absolute baloney. Pentagon physicist Jonathan Huebner has predicted the end of innovation on the horizon. In fact, instead of facing a future of accelerating change, we are entering a new dark age.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18625066.500

This does not bode well for the future of bio, nano, info and cogno.

[Jay]

For the love of all things that are holy: ban this monkey character from your site.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Hey, at least he cited a source this time. Huebner should never have gotten published, and it's a shame he's not more famous so we could laugh at him a few years from now, but I can't complain too much about this particular comment of MMG's.

But we've now had requests from two different people to ban him, and if in future he posts opinions without citing sources or any other foundation, there's a good chance we will.

Chris

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

I should clarify: I didn't mean that Huebner's work shouldn't have been published at all. What I was thinking about when I wrote that was his opinion that we may be approaching the limits of technology. I don't see how anyone (including him) who studies technology could seriously think that.

I've made a blog post that goes into this in more detail:
http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/07/limits_of_techn.html

Chris