Four different but related future worlds emerged from a recent Oxford University conference sponsored by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council:
The purpose of the conference [was] to consider how technologies might develop and converge. How nanotechnology, genomics, information technology and cognitive science might come together to drive the next rounds of technological developments and what are the social, economic, environmental and other implications.
A quick look at future scenarios envisioned by conference participants:
The World of Gridlock
It is a world of competing world views and groups pitted against each other. Converging technologies have caused alignments of world views to come into a frozen and mutually dysfunctional equilibrium. It is a world of high competition, conflicting values and little co-operation... The traditional left-right alignments are re-organised but refrozen. The Capulets are the future 'enhanced' human beings. The Montagues represent the 'naturals'. They rarely talk to each other. It is a very scary world where you can start to see the outlines of speciation where more than one kind of human walks the earth.The Competitive but Regulated World
This is a world where the regulations lag rapid innovation. The world is rapid in developing new technologies, but it's slow to learn from them. It has a lot of stop-start dynamics and reinforcing loops of behaviour. It returns to a question of how to regulate or manage what we don't know with uncertain developments in the future and also how to meet the challenges of globalisation.The Open, Dynamic, Cooperative World
An attempt to show a fast-paced world with open sharing of information and dynamic public-private cooperation... The work of life extension becomes open sourced, and it becomes a multi-trillion industry, with people living well into their 180s... The six-legged horse of the future wins the Royal Ascot, and needy children win [Huh?] ... A neural net, a non-technological human capability, is developed to solve problems like climate change... Global carbon emissions decrease. It is a connection of the human and the technological.The World of 'No Glue'
This is hyper-competitive world where social connections fray. It's an extremely fluid and dynamic world. The roots of this begin in the late-1970s and early 1980s with something as innocuous as automatic direct debit. Bill payments and direct payments develop complex system. Initially, the systems just carried out your wishes, but the systems began to make decisions for you based on criteria. It caused highly complex, interdependent, fluid world. There is a high level of noise with very little 'signal'. Information bombards you, but it's unclear what is accurate.
Read more about all four UK scenarios here.
In a far less sanguine but certainly more daring portrayal of the future, Dr. Yair Sharan, director of Tel Aviv University's Interdisciplinary Centre for Technology Analysis and Forecasting, foresees:
The World of Terror Horror
Western nations have less than 20 years to prepare for the next generation of terror threats... These could consist of suicide bombers remote-controlled by brain-chip implants and carrying nanotechnology cluster bombs, or biological compounds for which there is no antidote.
Dr. Sharan spoke last week at the Royal United Services Institute conference on Homeland Security:
We get a better-educated class of terrorists these days, he told the conference, while sci/tech advances can quickly find their way into irresponsible hands, or "proliferate" through the forces of globalisation. Not only that, technology is always smaller and cheaper, making it inevitable that bad people are going to get their hands on some bad-ass weaponry.Most bizarre of all his predictions is "the recruitment of huge numbers of suicidal candidates -- human bombs -- by mind control techniques".
Brain chip implants could create a more obedient servant than conventional techniques like hypnosis: "Imagine that this suicide bomber is remote controlled and cannot give up, even if he wants," warned Sharan.
This might be some way off, though -- Sharan estimated it would be more than ten years. Within five years, however, we might be faced with terrorists armed with powerful new explosives delivered by robot. Even remote controlled toys might be used to deliver dangerous payloads into crowded places like supermarkets, he said.
Some of these payloads, also conceivably within five years, would be constructed using radical nanotechnology that could produce something called the MOAB, or Mother of All Bombs. Nanotechnology, which is made using components one billionth of a metre across, might also give terrorists the means to release malicious nanobots into people's bloodstreams.
Malicious nanobots? Let's hope not. It is probably helpful, though, for someone like Sharan to raise concerns that only a few years ago would be laughed away as 'obviously' science fiction.
CRN's Global Task Force on Implications and Policy is moving forward with our own project to create a series of scenarios depicting various futures in which molecular manufacturing could be developed. Those stories will be made public within the next month or two and will be a major topic of discussion at our "Challenges & Opportunities" nano/bio conference this September in Tucson.
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
Brain chip implants..."Imagine that this suicide bomber is remote controlled and cannot give up, even if he wants," warned Sharan.
"...only a few years ago would be laughed away as 'obviously' science fiction."
I would have been in the highly skeptical grouping if not the laughingly amused ones.
However, the fact that we're looking to control moths and the Chinese are controlling pigeons through remote control brain chips makes one wonder how far fetched this really is...even today. Yes, it is more complicated. You would need to be able to shut down other centers or links for verbal communication, facial expression, etc. Things that would allow the human-bot to indicate to the outside world that they aren't in control of their own body mechanics.
How difficult is that? I don't know, but I'd bet some smart neuroscientist could tell you pretty quickly. And if they can't today, the way that field is rapidly advancing it won't be a decade from now before they can.
Scary stuff to think about.
Posted by: Eric | June 27, 2007 at 09:47 AM
I'm betting on "The World of Gridlock," though of course I'd much rather have "The Open, Dynamic, Cooperative World." Alas, as things stand right now we're pretty much defaulting to the former and that will likely persist for a few decades until we get rid of the "naturals" by them largely dying off of old age and disease since they will resist any efforts to cure them of such by all these “new-fangled” means. (I see this as predominantly a generational problem, at least in first world countries). Their grandkids will grow up with it and won’t be so hung up about it.
Posted by: Janessa Ravenwood | June 27, 2007 at 11:31 AM
Years ago I came home on leave from my military duties and spoke to my cousins about chip implants and tracking devices that were implanted. They said I was crazy that no such thing existed that could be implanted in mankind. Well I know for a fact that it could be true.
Posted by: Gofer | July 17, 2007 at 09:56 PM