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Cultural Diversity
It takes a think tank of disparate, diverse and complementary thinkers
to solve a code. We have a big code to crack in the world today and
a lot of it has to deal with people who are hungry, people who need
water, people who need care, and people who need human rights. We have
a big responsibility. But we cannot let that responsibility deter us
from our natural path as designers in thinking.
In
dealing with cultural diversity, we need to think about the recent discontinuities
and the constants in society. A recent discontinuity would be terrorism,
the attack on the United States and our response to that. The constant
is that we are afraid of change. We continue to be afraid of change
no matter how much change we keep on making throughout our lifetime from
the earliest days to today and into tomorrow. Change is something to which
we must perpetually adapt.
Inclusion
Regarding change, we must ask who is involved? Who are the stakeholders?
What are the trends? The stakeholders are those of you reading this
article right now. Because you care, you are a part of the process.
Stakeholders are also those who do not care and are not part of the
process because peripherally, they will be involved and carried along. FM 2030 (the first transhuman) said people may be going into the future not
head-first but rear-first. They will be dragged by their belt loops
or bootstraps, pulled into the future whether they like it
or not. And this is usually what happens. It would be more preferential
if we could bring everyone with us happily and smiling, but that does
not always happen. The trends would be right now for us to figure out
ways to bring people into the future so that they are part of the design
process. Figure 2 illustrates all the players that must be included in gobal design.
Figure 2
Preferred Futures
We are a bit concerned about the emerging issues and potential events that could come about. These include ramifications of runaway
nanotechnology, runaway assemblers, and molecular engineering - and areas
that could tamper with the human body, such as nanorobots that go into
the body or into the cosmos. The question is: How will nanotechnology
be used?
The
new ideas and critical uncertainties are the areas about which I care
most because the new ideas are the plans that we have not quite seen
yet. They are the potentially impossible futures that once we put our
mind to and work together to solve, we will be able to develop events we would like to
realize. These are preferred futures. And there is not one preferred
future, but a myriad of preferred futures. We need to
design a vantage point to see these preferred futures in order
to bring them into alignment so that one or two may happen. Hopefully,
the ones that happen will be those that will be the most beneficial
to the global design of society.
Sociology,
economics, technology, politics these are the areas about which
most of us argue and on what most of us tend to build our own theories
and philosophies. When we think about the political arena for the future,
we know that it is somehow tied into economics. We know that it is also
tied into how society trades. We know that it ties into our human rights
and into the ability of society to accept and move with rapid technological
change. So the question is how will molecular nanotechnology work into
these four areas of society from which we develop forecasts, strategic
plans, and frameworks for the future?
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