Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World

Chapter 5. Technology Acceleration and Pushback

In the coming decade, new technologies will continue to proliferate at a rapid pace, creating new opportunities and sources of value. In the next 10 years, we will witness further advances in the ways in which three technology domains in particular—computing, biotechnology, and nanotechnology—become even more “mutually catalytic,” enabling and accelerating one another. This will open up startling new opportunities for sensing and connecting, for mimicking and changing nature, and for radical enhancement of human beings themselves. Not surprisingly, we will see this “progress” increasingly challenged by those who fear its ultimate, and perhaps unintended, consequences. The resulting tension between ...