Global Design for Geoethical Nanotechnology

The Complex Adaptive System
Complexity and systems are happening simultaneously, but it is the moment when the adaptation takes place and the actors, variables or agents suddenly form new patterns. Those new patterns start forming, balancing and reinforcing loops and then that forms new patterns. This is happening simultaneously as the world is becoming more prepared for the full automation and perpetual adaptation that goes hand in hand with nanotechnology.

In 1981, I had a very good chat with Buckminster Fuller about how we could get people to work together. He was holding a conference at that time and I flew into Los Angeles for it. It was on the World Game plan. Adjacent to the stage was a big map and people would come up from the audience and start moving pucks on the different locations around the planet. Each person had a formula of how they had to make the world work together and they bargained, bartered, traded, and negotiated.

They came up with ways in which each area could produce something that would benefit the other area, knowing full well that a lot of the problem in the world is getting the resources to the people in need. They formed linkages like bridges where they saw a problem, and then people would get together, leave their pucks over here and form a bridge in the link. They would use colors to represent different products, whether it was agriculture or technology or education. It made a beautiful design.

Massive Change
It was then that I made up my mind that design is so essential to the future. Bruce Mao, a Canadian friend of mine, has a project now called Massive Change. Bruce is figuring out ways to explain, through the art world and museums, how change happens on many different fronts - technological, social, economic, political, and environmental - and how those fronts can come together and work. He's not looking at it as a transhumanist or a futurist. Instead, he takes the perspective that the action is what needs to take place now in determining not just the ethics and not just the philosophy and not just the physical protocol of it, but what we can do in a game plan.

Global design, of course, means how the entire world works together. Today, there is a program where people come together and pay a good amount of money in order to work on games that have developed through Buckminster Fuller’s World Game Plan. It is all animated, electronic, and you can partake in person or via the internet. People take on different roles. Each player is given a card and you join the team. You do not know what your role is going to be, but you have the card and you find out that you have to trade something, perhaps something in which you do not believe. Or you have to solve a problem, maybe one that you have already solved or one that you would never want to solve.

The point of this game is to teach people different skills and develop their communication. The reason I think this is important for global design is that we know we have the talent, the skills, and the opportunity. What we do not know is whether or not we can work together because we all come from different places and our biases can confuse us in as simple an act as sentence structure. It is how we phrase words and how we lay out the design that will make a difference in how we communicate together.