Painting Pictures, Nano Style

From a recent article in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future.

Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.

This is the world in 30 years' time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces. It includes an "analysis of the key risks and shocks". Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as "probability-based, rather than predictive".

The 90-page report comments on widely discussed issues such as the growing economic importance of India and China, the militarisation of space, and even what it calls "declining news quality" with the rise of "internet-enabled, citizen-journalists" and pressure to release stories "at the expense of facts". It includes other, some frightening, some reassuring, potential developments that are not so often discussed.

That report is the kind of thing on the desk of people at Great Britain's Ministry of Defence.

Meanwhile, in Canada, some Army leaders are seeing this [PDF]:

Crisis in Zefra is a fictional narrative designed to illustrate emerging concepts and technologies that could become part of Canada's Army of the Future. Set in 2025, this story follows what starts out as a routine patrol mission through the streets of war-torn Zefra, but the situation quickly degrades into a 'three-block-war' scenario.

The aim of this publication is to stimulate both interest and debate on the conceptual development of Canada's Army. Readers are encouraged to refer to the Canadian Army publication Future Force when reading Crisis in Zefra, although it is not required to enjoy this publication.

This publication presents a fictional scenario only and should not be quoted as an authoritative source for any detail of policy, doctrine, technique or procedure in the Canadian Army.

In the UK, the MoD is "painting a picture" of the future, albeit "probability-based, rather than predictive" -- in Canada, they're using "fictional scenarios" to illuminate conceptual development of the "Army of the Future."

But that's not all. Europe's Nanologue project recently published a report [PDF] on "The future of nanotechnology" that includes three scenarios about the progress of nanotech, circa 2015.

Story-telling, fictional scenarios, painting pictures -- it's an important way of:

1. Helping people understand what some of possible futures might look like.
   
2. Helping decision makers develop sensible policies to deal with anticipated problems.
   
3. Helping all of us to envision likely outcomes of various direction-setting choices.

It appears that the CRN Global Task Force is in good company as we continue our effort to create a series of professional-quality scenarios about the near-future development of molecular manufacturing within the context of projected trends in science, technology, and global politics. We've produced three different stories so far.

In our next workshop, later this month, we will work on at least two more stories. The process that began in January 2007 will be repeated until we have a broad and strong collection of scenarios that are ready to be published. We'll keep you posted on progress.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[Rip]

Are the first three stories that you've created available for reading yet? Or are you waiting until you have more until you release them?

[Mike Treder, CRN]

Thanks for the question, Rip. We've chosen not to publish any of the stories until we have a collection of at least six to eight. It is important that none of the scenarios is taken as an individual "prediction" of the future, but that they be assessed for what we can learn from them in aggregate.