By Jim Thomas, ETC Group

A guest blog in the Alternative Perspectives on Technology Innovation series

For a fresh perspective on how to do technology governance consider starting somewhere else. I suggest York Castle in Northern England – a stark stone tower from the thirteenth century.

It was here in 1812 that the English state first executed fifteen men for the newly established crime of machine-breaking. They were Luddites – the original kind: artisan weavers who saw the factory system as an assault on their livelihoods and communities. At the time England was convulsed by the ‘machine question’ – with fiery debates in parliament and hundreds of fiery attacks on cloth mills by followers of the mythical Ned Ludd. As the first industrial revolution gathered steam, literally, the political class made a deliberate decision to side with the new industrialists. 12,000 Soldiers were deployed to quell the Luddite uprising – more than were abroad fighting Napoleon. The Frame Breaking Act made Luddism punishable by death and in time the word Luddite itself was transformed into a term of contempt and abuse that lasted all the way to 21^st century science debates. Its fair to say the Luddites lost – big time.

I should admit right now that I’m a big fan of the Luddites – Not that its much fun supporting an extinct political movement. Unlike sports teams there’s neither merchandise to buy nor Facebook groups to join (not unless you count this: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ye-Luddites/121981285761?v=info ). But I like Ned Ludd and his gang for two reasons.

Firstly I think they were right in ways they didn’t even know at the time. Our contemporary crises of climate change, overproduction and industrial pollution trace back in obvious ways to the industrial revolution as do the emergence of  urban and labour problems that flowed from the factory system and the urbanization that it gave rise to. The new cloth factories made possible a level of demand that justified establishing cotton plantations and a vicious slave trade setting in motion cycles of violence and racism that still persist today. Did the industrial revolution also bring benefits to society – of course it did although those benefits remain very unevenly distributed. Did the Luddites know they were fighting the roots of future racism. No – but their instincts were good.

Secondly I admire the Luddites for their success (albeit brief) in creating  a large-scale truly popular debate about emerging technologies. The widespread uprising of 1811-16 was more than just a wave of hysterics. Popular geek culture casts a ‘Luddite’ as a technologically inept dunce, fearful of change. Historical accounts reveal nothing of the sort. Real Luddites were adept users of complex hand weaving looms. They often espoused nuanced views on the technological revolution happening around them. They were not uniformly anti-technology: Their grievances, as recorded in song and declarations , were specifically with technologies that were “harmful to the common good” – as good a standard as any against which to asses technological appropriateness.  In their night time raids they would break some mechanical frames that they considered unjust while leaving others untouched that they considered benign. They recognised technological power as political, entwined with monopoly power and responsible for a lowering of standards and production of shoddy goods. They even practiced a radical form of democratic  technology assessment that we haven’t seen the like of since: dragging bulky mechanical looms to the market place to hold public trials in which all the community could pass judgement on the new machines – a public consultation process of the most inclusive kind.

I was once involved in organizing such a Luddite-style technology trial – at York Castle no less. A group of fellow activists dragged a motor car to the old stone tower and we set up public court, inviting bystanders to testify for or against the impact of the internal combustion engine on all our lives. Road kill, asthma, community destruction and climate change were weighed against the increased mobility and economic opportunities provided by four fast wheels. Everyone who happened to pass by became the jury.  On balance the car was found guilty of being ‘harmful to the common good’ but received a lighter sentence than the Luddites had on the same spot. This symbolic exercise in popular assessment of technology was exactly 100 years too late to influence the relevant innovation policy. Nonetheless it set me thinking: What if we weren’t too late? What if we could drag emerging technologies into a modern court of public deliberation and democratic oversight. What might that look like?

I’ve been turning over that question for about 15 years now while active in global debates on emerging technologies –  particularly GM Crops, Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology and  Geo-engineering – Debates in which I’ve encountered the term Luddite, meant as a slur, more times than I care to count. Language like this tumbles carelessly out of history .. but I find the parallels striking. Once again we are in the early phases of a new industrial revolution. Once again powerful technologies (Converging Technologies ) are physically remaking and sometimes disintegrating our societies. Those  of us in civil society carrying out bit-part campaigns, issuing press releases and launching legal challenges are in a sense attempting to drag technology governance away from the darkness of narrow expert committees and into the sunny court of public deliberation for a broader hearing.. It seems a perfectly reasonable and democratic urge. But there’s got to be a better and more systematic way to do that?

So far I’ve found three sets of proposals that might begin to put technology oversight into the open and back in the hands of a wider public:

• Public Engagement: Citizens Juries, Knowledge exchanges, People’s Commissions.

No don’t yawn. I grant you that science policy types (and the rest of us) have every reason to groan when they hear the term “Public engagement in Science”. Like other  empty buzz phrases (“sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility” come to mind) its too easily appropriated – but there is still (just about) some value in imagining and practicing what actual involvement mechanisms we could craft to enable a more democratic form of innovation governance.  Citizen’s Juries in places as diverse as Andra Pradesh, Mali and Brazil have enabled marginalized groups such as farmers to at least take a place alongside seed companies and biotech giants in policy processes. While People’s Commissions (investigation processes run by citizens groups) may get short shrift from a condescending political establishment yet can often exhibit excellent foresight, drawing on sources of grassroots knowledge  that closetted self-referential science committees might never open up to. These days my faith in public engagement  is waning having watched several governments employ such processes as a thinly disguised public relations ploy or to tie up the energies of civil society. Unless a public engagement process has a clear promise by those in power that they will listen, respond and demonstrably act on reccomendations its likely to lose the interest of the participants too.

• Global Oversight: ICENT.

ICENT stands for the International Convention for the Evaluation of New Technologies – a UN level body for foresighting emerging technology trends and then applying a wide-ranging assessment process that will consider the social, environmental and justice implications of the innovation being scrutinised. It doesn’t exist yet and maybe it never will but at ETC Group we have dedicated a lot of time to imagining what such a body could look like (we even have some nifty organagrams – see pg 36-40 of this) For example there would be bodies scanning the technological horizon and others making a rough reckoning of whether a new technology needed a strong oversight framework or not. Others tasked with bringing in a broad range of knowledge (what do the indigenous folks say?) or identifying exactly the right place in the system of global governance to begin regulatory moves. At a time when tech governance is several decades late each time we find a new platform emerging (Nanotech? Synthetic Biology? Geoengineering?) An ICENT–like body could maybe get international machinery in gear a bit quicker – ideally before industrial interests have already written those technologies into next quarter’s earning sheets and are shipping them to market.

• Popular assessment : Technopedia?

The only governance and regulations that work are those where somebody is paying attention – so  rather than hide technology assessment in rarefied committees why not hand it to the wisdom of the crowds. Wikipedia may not be the most perfectly accurate source of all knowledge but it is comprehensive, up to date and flexible and provides an interesting model. Actually Wikipedia entries are often not a bad place to start if you want to suss out the societal and environmental issues raised by the zeitgeist regarding new technologies. How about a dedicated wiki site for collaborative monitoring and judging of emerging technologies? Such a site could be structured so that, unlike the halls of power, marginal voices have a space and are welcome. A grassroots army of  volunteer technology assessors could help fill out the questions that Brussels or Washington never asks: What is the feminist take on this technology? How does it impact indigenous or disabled groups? What livelihood issues does this raise for the poor? Will the global commodities trade be affected? Perhaps an extended social media approach to technology assessment could convene online juries, host global conference calls and draft peoples reports for input into policy deliberations.

Don’t get me wrong.. approaches like these are not panaceas .. Adopt them all and some of us in civil society  might still feel there are a few metaphorical mechanical frames that would still need breaking. For example I’m not sure a modern day Ned Ludd would be content to spend his whole time writing wiki entries.

Then again, at least he might participate in his own facebook group…

______________________________

Jim Thomas is a Research Programme Manager and Writer with the ETC Group based in Montreal, Canada. His background is in communications, writing on emerging technologies and international campaigning.

Formerly an organiser with grassroots direct action movements in Europe and North America, Jim spent seven years with  Greenpeace International as a campaigner on food and genetic  engineering issues before joining ETC Group in 2002. Jim organised the  first international meeting on the societal impacts of Nanotechnology (held in the European Parliament), speaks around the world on  emerging technology issues and has authored several reports, chapters and press  articles on Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology and  GeoEngineering.  He writes a regular ‘Tech Reckoning’ column for The Ecologist Magazine exploring the  politics of next generation technologies.

Trained as a historian to look back at the history of technology, Jim is now proccupied with the future of technology. Once upon a time he was an award winning slam poet but then he had children…

ETC Group have a blog too…

The final part of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21^st century

Nine months ago, I embarked on an ambitious project to flesh out the ideas presented in a seminar given at the James Martin 21st Century School at the University of Oxford.  The seminar was titled ““Rethinking science and technology innovation: A Personal Perspective.”  In it, I spoke about three factors that are coming together to change the landscape in which science and technology are developed and used for social good (coupling, communication and control), and how science and technology policy might respond to the new challenges that are arising as a consequence.

Rather naively, I thought this would occupy me for a few weeks.  The fact that I gave the original seminar in March, and I’m typing this in December, is a rather damning testament to my own lack of foresight!

Finally though, I have come to the end of the series.  I’m not sure how useful it has been or whether it will stand the test of time – there are certainly a lot of words within the eleven blogs associated with it, but whether they coalesce into new and worthwhile ideas is another matter entirely.  However, it has   helped me explore more thoroughly some of the concepts that drove the original seminar, and further develop my thoughts on science and technology might play in the 21st century.

The complete blog series can be accessed from here.  It addresses the critical roles science and technology will increasingly play in society over the coming decades; the challenges of getting science and technology-based strategies and policies right; and thoughts on how to respond to these challenges – leading to a future where science and technology are used for good, rather than leading to harm.

I’m not going to attempt to summarize the series here – a pretty succinct precis of the challenges and opportunities we face can be found in this post if you are interested.  Rather, I wanted to round the series off by ruminating more broadly and speculatively on the future challenges and opportunities we face.

First though, something of a confession: I’m a believer in science and technology.  I use the “B” word advisedly – I’m not sure I could prove unequivocally that science and technology innovation lead to people and communities being happier, more fulfilled, or having a greater “quality of life.”  But as a scientist, I can see how science and technology provide the means to alleviate suffering, improve health and well-being, and help define who we are.  I also see a society that is built on a foundation of science and technology and that is unavoidably and irreversibly dependent on them.  And as I gaze into my (admittedly murky) crystal ball, I find it hard to conceive of a future where science and technology are not essential to maintaining and improving people’s lives around the world.

But herein lies a challenge – if we are dependent on science and technology, how do we ensure that this dependency works for us, rather than against us?  We’ve spent the past several millennia grappling with this question, not always successfully.  But in the past, the rates of science discovery and technology advance have typically taken place over timescales that have allowed us to adapt (eventually) to the changes they bring about.

Entering the 21st century, all this is changing.  Science and technology are now progressing so fast that we are struggling to adapt to one set of breakthroughs before the next comes along – and the rate at “progress” is being made is accelerating.  Intertwined with this are the three factors of coupling, communication and control that are leading to challenges and opportunities never before experienced in human history.

From where I’m standing, it’s hard to imagine how we can ride the coming wave without a radical rethink of how we develop and use science and technology within society.    Certainly, it seems hopelessly naive to assume that how we’ve done things in the past will serve us well in the future.  Rather, we’ve got to grow up as a global society – and grow up fast – if we are to ensure science and technology improve our lives and those of future generations, rather than causing more problems than they solve.

In this series of articles, I’ve sketched out my own thoughts on where the challenges are, and where some of the solutions might lie.  They are rough, ill-formed and sometimes naive – this is very much a work in progress.  Yet hopefully they provide some kernels of value as we begin to face address challenges that are very much unique to our generation.

Having said this, I must end on a note of caution.  I am a science and technology optimist, but a cautious one.  I genuinely believe that science and technology – if developed and used appropriately – are critical to addressing the challenges of living and thriving in an increasingly complex and resource-constrained world.  But that’s my belief; it’s not a universal truth. At the end of the day, if we are to mature as a global society, we’re going to need to listen to other perspectives that maybe don’t see the world in the same way, and take full account of them as we rethink science and technology for the 21st century.

And rather conveniently, that’s the focus of the next blog series on 2020 Science.

]]> http://2020science.org/2009/12/09/science-and-technology-innovation-looking-to-the-future/feed/ 1 http://2020science.org/2009/10/15/riding-the-wave-rethinking-science-technology-policy/ http://2020science.org/2009/10/15/riding-the-wave-rethinking-science-technology-policy/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:35:54 +0000 Andrew Maynard http://2020science.org/?p=2328

Part 8 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21^st century

Much to my embarrassment, I’ve just realized that it was over four months ago that I wrote the previous blog in this series – a series that was supposed to evolve over just a few weeks!  Most inconveniently, other priorities ended up interfering with my well-laid plans and I found myself distracted from completing the series, just three posts before its conclusion.

The good news though is that this gives me an excuse to provide a lightning summary of the story so far, which goes something like this:

• We stand at a nexus of unimaginable technological potential, and unprecedented global challenges.  How we develop and use science and technology over the coming decades will determine the quality (and possibly even the quantity) of life for coming generations.
• Three factors in particular are influencing the challenges we face, and the tools we have at our disposal to meet them.  These are the rate at which knowledge and ideas are propagating and influencing people, the increasingly strong links between human actions and environmental re-actions, and the ability of scientists, technologists and engineers to bend the material world to their every whim; from atoms and molecules to global weather systems.  These are my three “C’s” – communication, coupling and control.
• The coupling between human actions and environmental re-actions is cumulative, non-linear, and rapidly increasing in importance.  Which means that we are now facing global challenges that are more complex and further reaching than any previous generation has had to deal with.
• Rapid changes in how we communicate with each other are rewriting the rules on how society operates, from the global scale to the local level.
• High-impact advanced in science and technology are being driven increasingly by advances in control over materials at the scale of atoms and molecules.  Atom-level control over everything from DNA to advanced materials to smart drugs is poised to vastly extend our technological reach as a species.
• Separately, these three factors confront us with new challenges and new opportunities.  Together, they demand a new way of thinking about science and technology if we’re going to ride the wave of the future, rather than being engulfed by it.

The obvious question at this point – and the subject of this blog – is “how effective are current approaches to developing and using science and technology, and what (if anything) needs to change if we are to adapt and thrive as a species?”  In other words, how as a society can we make decisions that will ensure we have the necessary scientific understanding and technological know-how to overcome emerging challenges and realize the opportunities facing us, without creating more problems than we solve?

And that means we need to talk about science and technology policy.

Effective science and technology policy depends on a robust a framework for decision-making that helps ensure an appropriate level of investment in science and technology, and a good return on that investment.  Every developed country/economy has well-established approaches to science and technology policy—whether formally expressed, or simply in the form of a prevalent set of assumptions or beliefs amongst policy makers.  And these approaches have worked okay in the main over the past fifty years or so.

But are they flexible enough to weather the looming challenges of the 21^st century?

In the United States, approaches to science and technology policy still reflect largely the thinking of Vannevar Bush.  In 1945, Bush presented President Truman with a vision of science in Science, The Endless Frontier that started with basic research, and ended with social and economic growth.  While thinking has evolved since then, many policy makers are still strongly influenced by his ideas.

In crude terms, Bush’s concept was that pure research (directed predominantly by scientists) leads to applied research, which in turn leads to technological innovation.  This in turn stimulates economic growth, which leads to more jobs, more money, and a better quality of life for citizens.

This top-down, linear model has worked well over the years in the U.S. – scientists have been funded reasonably well by the Federal Government, and have been given considerable latitude in what they do.  And in the U.S. at least, this investment seems to have resulted in considerable technology innovation and wealth generation.

But I’m not sure the same approach has got what it takes to address the very different challenges of the 21^st century.

Although current approaches to science and technology policy tend to be more sophisticated than Bush’s model, there is still a tendency to take a top-down linear approach.  Typically under this model, goals for science and technology investment are crafted, funding levels decided, and mechanisms and routes by which those funds will be allocated are identified within government.  It is then assumed that this up-front decision-making will lead to innovation, which will lead to jobs, wealth and, at the end of the day, a better quality of life for citizens.

The degree to which policy makers adhere to or diverge from this (admittedly simplistic) overview depends on where you are in the world.  But this general approach still plays a large role in determining the direction of and funding for science and technology policy in many countries.

Yet this very hierarchical approach to decision-making may not have what it takes to ensure scientific and technological success over the coming years.

First up, it assumes that heavy investment in basic research will naturally lead to technology innovation.  This over-simplistic assumption has been questioned repeatedly over the past decades, perhaps most notably by Donald E. Stokes in his book Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation – it’s an assumption that is likely to be further challenged as the interplay between science, technology and society becomes increasingly complex and dynamic.

Then it assumes that up-front investment in science and technology will naturally lead to an improved quality of life through wealth creation.  Yet the values on which the model is based are beginning to look a little simplistic—dated even—in today’s diverse and interconnected world.

And finally, it supports a top-down approach to science and technology policy that encourages policy lock-in.  This occurs when there are few mechanisms to rethink policy decisions that don’t work—a very precarious position to be in where the policy process potentially lags a long way behind technological progress.

In other words, the widely used linear model of science policy could well fall flat in a world where communication, coupling and control demand responsive and adaptive approaches to guiding and utilizing science and technology.

So what’s the alternative?

A complete rethink of science and technology policy frameworks is way beyond the scope of this blog.  But two issues stand out as being at the top of the rethink-list: the need for a less hierarchical policy framework, and the need for more effective feedback mechanisms.

Starting from the bottom, most people would agree that the end goal of investing in science and technology is improved quality of life.  But what this means and the route to achieving it will vary, depending on a number of factors.  The concept that technology innovation and wealth generation will automatically lead to an improved quality of life is one perspective—but it isn’t the only one.  As social and political boundaries are redrawn through new ways of communicating and technology-driven possibilities advance at an increasing rate, I suspect this perspective will begin to look a little naïve.  An alternative approach is to have multiple goals for the science and technology endeavor—recognizing that wealth, jobs, quality of life etc. are important and intertwined, but not necessarily linearly connected.  In other words, recognizing that quality of life may depend on more than making money!

Similarly, I suspect there will need to be a rethink of the relationship between setting top-level goals for science and technology policy and the means of achieving those goals.  Rather than a top-level steer on science and technology policy, it is going to become increasingly important to flatten the process of crafting policies that determine the direction research and development is pointed in, how much is invested in it, and how the money is spent.

But perhaps most importantly, there will need to be increased feedback between what comes out of science and technology policy, and what goes in.

In any complex and dynamic system, feedback is the key to ensuring stability and adaptability.  The Bush-type hierarchical model of science and technology policy has relatively little in the way of feedback.  But this will need to change if policies are to lead to scientific research and technological innovation that achieve what they set out to.  Rapid advances in communication, coupling and control are pushing us a long way out of equilibrium—without effective feedback loops, the consequences could be catastrophic.

A robust science and technology policy framework will depend on many and varied feedback mechanisms.  But amongst these, the ability to review inputs against outputs, and the participation of people and organizations affected by policy decisions, will be essential.

From this perspective, a revised science and technology policy framework that will help us rise to the challenges of the 21^st century might look something like this:

This is still rather simplistic.  It also reflects to a degree changes in science and technology policy that are already occurring in some countries.  But it does provide some insight into how approaches to science and technology might be crafted that will help us not just cope with life in the 21^st century, but to thrive—to ride the wave of the future rather than being engulfed by it.

I’ll look at some of these approaches to science and technology in the next blog in the series – Completing the circle: Coupling science & technology outputs to inputs.

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Confluence: Where communication, coupling and control collide

Next: Completing the circle: Coupling science & technology outputs to inputs [Coming soon]

Part 7 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

Yesterday, I listened to respected economists discussing geoengineering; gave a Skype interview on nanotechnology from the comfort of my own home; and watched as reactions to Michael Jackson’s death spread through virtual web-based communities.  Twenty years ago, when Jackson was at the height of his artistic powers, such a day would have been the stuff of science fiction.  Now, it’s just business and usual.

Looking back over the past two decades, it’s easy to see how Coupling, Communication and Control have changed the world we live in.  The impact of CFC’s on the ozone layer, the looming global warming crisis and the associated acidification of oceans are all testaments to how recent human actions are increasingly coupled to global environmental re-actions.  Technological advances built on the back of our increasing control over matter – whether living or non-living – have led to profound changes in what we can achieve as a species.  And the global communications revolution – from the rise of the internet to the emergence of social media – continues to bend previously rigid social, commercial and geographical boundaries.

Yet important as the changes associated with each of these individual “C’s” are, it is at their intersection that their true transformative nature is revealed.  This is where ideas and influences spark off each other, leading to transformative leaps in innovation and impact…

To some extent we’re seeing this already.  Modern global communications wouldn’t be possible without a whole raft of technological breakthroughs.  Our impact on the environment is driven as much by our technologies and associated resource demands as by a growing world population, while solutions to the resulting consequences are technology-driven more often than not.  And worldwide responses to global issues are being facilitated by increasingly sophisticated communications media.

As the overlap and integration between each of the three “C’s” grows, the rate of innovation is likely to accelerate.  Yet the place where the really transformative stuff will occur is going to be at the center – at the confluence of advances in Coupling, Communication and Control.  This is where we can expect game-changing innovations that make the impossible possible.  It’s also where we are likley to see new technologies and ideas emerge that are potentially beyond our collective ability to handle with any degree of maturity.

And this brings us to the key science and technology-driven challenge we face as we head further into the twenty first century:  How are we going to handle the powerful and transformative new opportunities and dangers arising from this confluence of coupling, communication and control, without messing things up?

In contrast to the rapid developments likely at this nexus of the three “C’s,” the inertia inherent in established institutions and ideas will resist change.  And so unlike some, I don’t think we will  adapt naturally to the challenges that are coming. Yet the result of ignoring them, assuming they are someone else’s problem, or trying to shoehorn them into outmoded ways of doing business, will most likely be social, economic and political collapse.

The alternative is to take a long hard look at what needs to be done in order to ride the coming wave rather than be engulfed by it.  From twenty years ago, today’s world would look familiar yet different.  Given the current rate of change, I suspect that the world twenty years  from now will be unrecognizable.  If we’re going to cope with the changes that are coming, we will need to learn how to change with them.  And one of the first places to start will be the policies that guide the science and technology that are driving – and will help navigate – this confluence of coupling, communication and control.

Next time: Riding the wave: Rethinking science & technology policy

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Nanoscale control: Leveraging biology

Next: Riding the wave: Rethinking science & technology policy

Part 6 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

The story so far: We are facing an unprecedented confluence of three factors that are forcing us to rethink how we develop and use science and technology to the benefit of society.  Coupling between our action’s and the Earth’s re-actions is more significant now than at any previous point in human history. Global Communications are dissolving previously rigid boundaries throughout society at a seemingly ever-increasing rate.  And then there’s the third “C” – Control…

Not to put too fine a point on it, control is what science and technology are ultimately about.  Science provides the tools for understanding how the world works; technology puts them to use.  This is how it’s been for the past 10,000 years.  So what’s different now?  The answer is that we are finally getting down to being able to manipulate the basic building blocks of matter – atoms and molecules.  Over the past 50 years we have made tremendous strides in being able to visualize and engineer materials at near-atomic scales.  And by doing so we have opened the door to a vast array of technological advances that were the stuff of dreams just a few decades ago.

In the previous post in this series, I wrote about three defining features of nanoscale control – smallness, strangeness and sophistication.  Here, I want to dwell a little more on the third of those – sophistication – as it is likely to underpin some of the more radical advances in science and technology over the next few years.

Three defining characteristics of controlling matter at the nanoscale

Over the past century, synthetic chemistry has changed the world.  The ability to systematically combine atoms together to make new molecules has revolutionized the way we live – virtually everything we touch depends on synthesized chemicals in some way.  Yet chemists are the first to admit that the number of chemicals that have so far been synthesized is minuscule compared to those just waiting to be discovered and made – although we appear to have had good control over the world of chemicals, we’ve only scratched the surface.

What if we had the tools to splice atoms and molecules together in new and innovative ways?  What if we could go beyond text-book chemistry, and invent new molecules that behaved more like nanoscale machines?  What if we could create systems of molecules that could self-replicate – just like biological systems, only better?  All of these goals are coming within reach as scientists learn how to build new molecules atom by atom.

"Nano car" synthetic molecules, from the lab of Professor Jim Tour at Rice University

A particularly interesting example – more a proof of concept – comes from Professor Jim Tour’s lab at Rice University.  Jim was interested in how some biological molecules carry out very physical tasks – like ferrying molecules from one place to another – and wondered whether totally artificial molecules could be invented that behaved in similar ways.  The result was a molecule dubbed the nano car.  Completely artificial, it consists of four “wheels” made of carbon-60 molecules, attached together with a chassis of  organic molecules.  What is significant is that the nano cars demonstrate thermally-induced directional motion on a surface – i.e. they are able in principle to ferry a payload of other molecules from point A to point B.  Writing in Nanotechnology Law and Business in 2007, Tour noted:

The achievement with the nanocar was significant because it demonstrated for the first time structurally controlled directional movement on a surface due to rolling of the wheels rather than the common non-directional stick-slip motion of molecules on a substrate surface.  The next goal of our project was to construct a nanomachine that can convert energy-inputs into controlled motion on a surface.

The nano car attempts to achieve something that occurs all the time in nature by painstakingly controlling how the various molecules that make it up are pieced together.  But the example begs a question – if we can begin to replicate what living systems – DNA-based systems – do, through nanoscale control, how much more could be achieved by starting with DNA in the first place? The answer is – rather a lot.

One of the more interesting discoveries in biochemistry over the past several years has been that many molecules in living systems do their stuff on a physical as much as a chemical level.  For instance, while the nano cars could potentially move molecules around on a surface, naturally occurring biological molecules exist that do this every day – nature has already evolved incredibly sophisticated systems that operate at the nanoscale.  Knowing that natural “molecular motors” exist, scientists have been working hard to create their own biologically-based and biology-inspired motors.

Cartoon of an autonomous molecular motor, courtesy of Andrew Tuberfield.

One such motor is an autonomous “walker” designed and constructed by Andrew Tuberfield’s group at the University of Oxford.  The molecule – which is DNA based – is designed to walk along a track constructed from DNA for as long as there is a supply of fuel – provided by a second set of engineered molecules.  The idea is similar to that embodied in the nano car – an engineered molecule that mimics some of the features of living systems.  But in this case the building blocks used – DNA-based molecules – allow a far more sophisticated device to be constructed.  The walker consists of two asymmetric feet attached to a DNA track.  Through random thermal motion, these feet are constantly lifting up from the track.  However, because of the asymmetry of the molecule, the left foot is uniquely exposed to the surrounding environment when it becomes elevated.  at this point, the researchers who designed the system engineered in two rather clever features.  First, a purposely designed molecule – H1 in the diagram – attaches to the left foot and removes it from the track as the foot extents.  The same cannot happen to the right foot because it is not accessible.  Then, a second molecule – H2 – attaches to the H1-foot pair and removes the original H1 molecule, leaving just an unattached foot.  At this point, one of two things can happen; the foot either attaches to the left.  Or it re-attaches to the right.  The probability of either happening is random.  But as re-attaching to the left results in the molecule ending up exactly where it started, only re-attachment to the right ends up in the molecule taking a step – and the step is always in the same direction.

By using engineered biological parts and controlling their construction at the nanoscale, the researchers have created a molecule that can move along a predetermined track in a predetermined direction, for as long as track and fuel exist – a Brownian ratchet that converts random motion into directional movement.  It may not seem a lot, but it is a tremendous step towards building nanoscale systems that begin to match what biology already does.

But this research raises a yet more intriguing question:  If we can use biological parts to make non-biological motors through nanoscale engineering, can we get into the very workings of biology itself? Biology, after all, is built on nanoscale processes – from DNA to the proteins it encodes for.  If we could control biology at the atomic and molecular level (and do it well), it would quite possibly one of the most transformative technological moves since the advent of agriculture.

Thirty years ago, the notion of controlling the code of life itself would have been laughable.  Now it seems within reach.

The plummeting time to sequence the human genome

Over the past few years, the ease with which genetic code can be sequenced has plummeted.  It took 13 years for teams of scientists around the globe to first read the human genome – completing the project in 2001.  In 2007, it took 2 months to sequence the genome of DNA-co-discoverer James Watson.  And by 2013 it is likely that your personal genome could be read in the time it takes to boil an egg.

Of course, sequencing just reads the information – it doesn’t tell you how to use it.  But here’s the important thing – sequencing genomes transforms the information from the physical domain to the digital domain, where it can be experimented with and engineered in new ways.  While restricted to the physical world, there were always going to be limitations to how effectively we manipulated and controlled genetic material.  In the digital domain, those limitations are gone.  Cheap affordable sequencing is ushering in the age of digital biology.

Schematic of the "digitization" of biology

However, playing around with genetic information on computers would be little more than a novelty if it weren’t for one further advance – the plummeting cost of DNA synthesis.  This completes the loop between the physical and digital worlds.  Now, once you have uploaded your genome into the computer and digitally enhanced it, the technology exists – or soon will – to download the new genome back into reality.  It’s a technology that promises to enable an incredibly sophisticated level of genetic engineering.  It allows brand new genetic code to be written on the computer, tested out in virtual space, then downloaded back into an organism.  It even allows brand new organisms to be designed and created from scratch.

This possibility was pushed home last year when Craig Venter’s team synthesized the genome of a bacterium – Mycobacterium genitalium – from scratch.  The team has yet to insert the synthesized DNA into a cell, and thus achieve – in effect – the creation of life form laboratory chemicals.  But it seems only a matter of time before this is achieved.

January 2008 - Craig Venter's team synthesize the complete genome of a new organism from scratch

We’re not quite there yet with the technology that will allow us to manipulate biology at the nanoscale.  But it’s coming.  And when it does, the level of control we have had over matter for the past ten centuries will seem like child’s play.

Throw this level of potential control into the mix with the other two “C’s,” and you have all the ingredients for a step-change in what we can do, and what the consequences are – for good and for bad.

Next time: Confluence: Where communication, coupling and control collide.

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Control at the nanoscale: Smallness, strangeness and sophistication.

Next: Confluence: Where communication, coupling and control collide.

Part 5 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

Last time in this series of occasional blogs, I made the rather bold statement that while science and technology are going to have a highly visible impact on our lives over the next few decades, progress is going to be underpinned in most cases by our increasing control over materials at the invisible nanoscale. It isn’t exactly intuitive why this should be the case though—how on earth can engineering matter on a scale a billion time smaller than the average person be so important?

In trying to answer this question, I want to take a rather unconventional approach and explore three advantages of working at this scale: Smallness, strangeness and sophistication.

Smallness. Size matters—it’s something we all understand intuitively.  There are occasions when you can do something with a small object or device that would be impossible otherwise.  This photo from Ilan Kelman for instance illustrates the idea perfectly: There are times that “smallness” gets you to places that larger objects can’t reach—like parking spaces!

It’s easy to see how making things that we can see and touch small can enhance their value.  But the utility of smallness doesn’t stop when things become invisible to the naked eye.  All the way down to the nanometer scale, there are opportunities to make things work better or work differently by making them small.

Here’s a very trivial example of smallness making a difference at the nanometer scale, but it’s a useful illustration of why size matters:

Silver is a great antimicrobial agent.  It’s been used for millennia to prevent infections from spreading and is one of the reasons why “silverware” is—or used to be—made of the metal.

But it’s not that easy to use.  Large lumps of metal aren’t always that easy to incorporate into products that you want to keep sterile or have antimicrobial properties.

One solution is convert the individual silver atoms into charged ions that can be dissolved in liquids and incorporated into other substances.  As its the ionic form of silver that is most harmful to microbes, this makes a lot of sense.  But ionic silver isn’t that easy to use either.  Say you have a silk scarf or a wound dressing you want to imbue with antimicrobial properties.  Getting those silver ions in there without changing the physical feel and nature of the material is a tough challenge.

This is where smallness comes in.  Make the silver metal into nanometer-sized particles, and it becomes relatively easy to get it into a wide range of products.  Because these are particles we are dealing with, there isn’t so much complex chemistry behind using them.  And because they are so small, they don’t unduly affect the feel and performance of the products they are used in.  As an added advantage, replacing a few large particles with millions of small ones increases the chances of microbes coming into contact with them manyfold.

Because of the advantages of smallness when it comes to using silver as an antimicrobial, there has been an explosion of products using silver nanoparticles—everything from refrigerators to socks to toothpaste.  And all because smallness gets you to new places.

It’s a trivial example, but it does illustrate an important way in which “smallness” through increased control over matter at the nanoscale leads to added value.

It’s not the only way though—there is also strangeness.

Strangeness. No two questions about it, things can get a little weird down at the nanoscale. This is good – it means that controlling matter at this scale opens up a whole new toolbox of material properties that can be put to good use.

Vicki Colvin at Rice University came up with a great analogy for strangeness a few years back.  It went something like this:  Imagine you have a cat.  It looks like a cat, sounds like a cat, smells like a cat.  Now, imagine you have a technology that allows you to make that cat smaller.  As you shrink your cat down, it gets smaller and smaller, but still retains its essential cat-ness.  But imagine reaching a point where suddenly, instead of looking, smelling, sounding like a cat, your cat becomes a dog!

This is the very essence of strangeness—materials behaving in unexpected and sometimes radically different ways when they are engineered at a nanometer scale.  This doesn’t always happen—it depends on the material and the scale on which the material is being engineered—but in some cases the changes in behavior can be startling.

A good example is found in the metal gold.

Gold is an inert, yellowish metal—everyone knows this.  It’s lack of reactivity is why so much jewelry is made from the stuff (it doesn’t tarnish), and in part why it holds its value.  But form gold into particles just a new nanometers across, and everything changes—the metal does the equivalent of transforming from a cat into a dog.  Instead of appearing yellowish in color, the particles now appear red, and become highly chemically active.

This change in color has been exploited for millennia in glass-making (unbeknownst to the glass-makers, who had no idea they were making and using nanoparticles), with perhaps the most famous example being the Lycurgus cup from Roman times.  Illuminated from behind, the gold nanoparticle-containing dichroic glass that the cup is made from appears deep red in color.

This strange behavior has a lot to do with how the movement of electrons in materials is affected when they are engineered at a nanometer scale.  As these movements affect everything from electrical conductivity and interactions with electromagnetic radiation—including visible light—to how a material conducts heat, nanometer-scale engineering allows scientists and engineers to tap into material properties that are rarely accessible without control at this level.

But it’s not enough to have a smorgasbord of strangeness at out fingertips—we also need the ability to use these unusual properties.  And this is where sophistication comes in.

Sophistication. As humans, we are pre-programmed to build things.  As kids, we start early—usually with large blocks.  But we soon learn that there are limits to what can be made with these rather awkward building blocks, and so we progress on to finer blocks—think of it as graduating from wooden blocks to Duplo.  However, it isn’t long before we outgrow these bricks and crave something smaller with which to create increasingly sophisticated structures.  And so we discover that ultimate building medium—Lego.

It’s a rather tongue in cheek analogy, but it illustrates something we all know: The smaller the building blocks we use, the more sophisticated the products we can make.  This applies at the human scale, but it just as equally applies at the nanometer scale.  In fact, being able to build with nanometer-scale clumps of atoms and molecules gives us perhaps what is the ultimate construction set.  And before anyone interjects with “surely that’s just chemistry,” the distinction here is the ability to put these small clumps where we want them with nanometer scale precision.  This is sophistication at the nanometer scale, and opens up new possibilities in engineering materials and products with enhanced or unique properties.

It’s probably fair to say that we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what can be achieved through sophisticated nanometer-scale engineering, but already there are examples that hint at the potential that is opening up.

Here you see a schematic of an actual nanometer-scale particle developed by Raoul Kopelman and Martin Philbert at the University of Michigan.  What is particularly interesting is the sophisticated way this particle has been engineered at the nanoscale to carry out a number of tasks.

The core particle is coated with a thin layer of PolyEthylene Glycol (PEG) to make it invisible to the body’s defense systems.  It is also covered with molecules that enable it to attach to a specific target cell—a particular cancer cell in this case.  Internally, the nanoparticle has been engineered with a contrast-enhancing agent, meaning that when sufficient particles are attached to the tumor being treated, they can be seen using imaging techniques like MRI.

Then the really clever bit—the particles have been engineered with a sensitizer.  In essence, this is a component that causes the particle to do something when it receives a signal.  In this case, when the particle is illuminated with a particular wavelength of light, it releases chemicals to kill the cancer cell it is attached to.

This “smart” particle represents an incredible degree of sophistication at the nanometer scale, and does what it does—destroys cancer cells without affecting healthy cells—because of this sophistication.  And it’s only one example from an increasing number of applications that demonstrate what can be achieved when we have the sophistication to build things at close to the scale of individual atoms and molecules.

At the end of the day, smallness, strangeness and sophistication don’t tell you everything you need to know to understand why an increasing ability to control matter at the nanoscale is so important.  But they do provide a pretty good insight—dare I say, a sophisticated insight—into what can be achieved by working at this scale.

They also create a bridge between two largely separate spheres that is poised to take our control over the world in which we live to an entirely new level.  But more of that next time.

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Control: Gaining mastery over the world at the finest level

Next: Nanoscale control: Leveraging biology

Part 4 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

So far in this series of occasional blogs, I’ve covered coupling and communication—two of three “C’s” which together are challenging how science and technology are best used to serve society.  Now it’s the time to delve into the third “C”—control.

Because this is a tough subject to cover in one bite, I’m going to split it between three posts.  Here, I’ll get the background stuff out of the way.  Then, in the following posts in the series, I’ll take a look at why this “C” is so transformative, and some of the more advanced directions control is taking us in.

To kick things off, I want to start big.  The image to the right is an artist’s impression of a scheme dreamt up by Roger Angel at the University of Arizona to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the earth—a possible approach to combating (in part) global warming.  It represents the idea of suspending trillions of solar diffusers – fuzzy translucent plates—at the Lagrange point between the earth and the sun, where they can deflect a small amount of the sun’s radiation away from the planet.

If we could achieve this, it would be the largest feat of planetary control ever undertaken.

Just a few years ago, such a scheme would have been pure science fiction.  But we are getting to the point where advances in science and technology are bringing mega-engineering projects like this within our grasp.  For the first time in human history, we have both the audacity and technology to think about controlling our environment on a planetary scale.

This taking control of things on a grand scale is part of what the third “C” is about.  But it is only the tip of the iceberg.  Going back to Angel’s solar sunshade, it’s worth asking what it would take to transform this idea from fantasy to reality.  In amidst the myriad engineering challenges it represents is the issue of materials—how do you make solar diffusers (or “flyers”) light enough yet robust enough to do their job?  The reality is, the materials needed to achieve this simply don’t exist at present.

Which means that for the plan to work, new materials need to be created.

This isn’t a trivial thing to achieve.  It’s not as if we are going to discover some fancy new element that can be made into a wonder-material.  Rather, the solution is going to lie in how we put small groups of regular atoms—the building blocks of everything we use—together in different ways, to form new and better materials.

And this brings us to the area where increasing control is going to be truly transformative—control over matter at the scale of atoms and molecules—the nanoscale.

But why should controlling matter down at this miniscule level make a difference? The answer lies in what makes stuff work better, and what messes it up.

Most materials we use nowadays are not as good as they could be.  They generally function OK, but they could be better.  And the reason for this is that down at the nanoscale, they are a mess—atoms aren’t aligned properly, there are gaps in the structure where there shouldn’t be, stuff is present that should not be there, while the stuff that should be there isn’t where it ought to be.

This isn’t surprising.  Until relatively recently, we didn’t have the tools or the know-how to engineer stuff down at the atomic level, so we had to make do with rather imperfect materials.  This is changing though, and it is changing extremely rapidly.

Eighty years or so ago, scientists began to develop ways of seeing—or at least taking a good stab at visualizing—the structure of materials on an atomic scale.  Techniques like electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction opened up a brand new perspective on how stuff is put together.  More importantly, these and other tools gave scientists the feedback they needed to start tinkering systematically with materials at the nanoscale.

The age of nanometer-scale control was born.

Over the past couple of decades, near atomic-level control over matter has surged ahead, as growing awareness of its importance has combined with greater incentives for scientists to work across traditional boundaries and huge funding initiatives from government and industry.  The result has been rapid progress in engineering materials and products that work—or work better—because their structure has been controlled and manufactured at the nanometer scale.  Products as diverse as computers and cosmetics are already benefitting from the added value that comes from nanoscale control.  Already there are hundreds of consumer products out there that manufacturers claim do what they do “better” because of nanoscale engineering.  These are small fry though compared to some of the applications in the pipeline—smart drugs, new power sources, faster computers, even designer microbes.  And the indications are that we are only just beginning to flex our nano-muscles.

The bottom line here is that while science and technology are going to have a highly visible impact on our lives over the next few decades, progress is going to be underpinned in most cases by our increasing control over materials at the invisible nanoscale.

To begin to grasp how working with matter at such a small scale opens up new opportunities, it’s worth focusing on three features of nanoscale control—smallness, strangeness and sophistication.  These will be the subjects of the next blog in this series.

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Communication: Science and technology in a connected world

Next: Control at the nanoscale: Smallness, strangeness and sophistication

Part 3 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

I’m fascinated by the power of communication.  The idea that someone’s perceptions and actions can be changed by information received through sight, sound or touch, is rather profound.  Even more so is the idea that, through exchanging information and ideas, people can influence and change the course of whole societies.

Communication—my third “C” in this series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century—is powerful.  It always has been.  But rapid changes in how we communicate with each other are rewriting the rules on how that power is manifest.  And no-where are these changes as significant as in the development and use of new science and technology.

I’m not going to write extensively about how modern communications are changing the world here—there are a thousand and one commentators discussing the emergence of the Flat Earth, globalization, Web X.0 and other ramifications of living in an increasingly connected world.  But I do want to establish how communication is a critical factor influencing the future development and use of science and technology. Because when combined with the other two “C’s”—Coupling and Control—new challenges arise that are going to be tough to handle from a 20th century perspective.

In broad terms, the changing face of global communications is affecting science and technology in three ways:

First, advances in modern communication are revolutionizing “peer-peer” and “peer-lay” information exchange. Twenty years ago, rooting out scientific information was a physical adventure.  I remember cycling between libraries, chasing up reference trails, lugging weighty tomes around while wandering along seemingly endless shelves of books.  I could get quite nostalgic about time spent surrounded by piles of journals in musty Cambridge libraries.  Nowadays of course nothing is further than the click of a mouse away.  And it’s not just journals—the internet is flooded with a wealth of information which is richer than could ever be imagined 20 years ago.  Researchers have access to vast arrays of new information in their own field, as well as new findings in other disciplines.  The result is a cross-fertilization that is driving the generation of new scientific knowledge and technology innovation at an unprecedented rate.

But the same information is also available to non-experts—the “lay public.”  Now, anyone can in principle access in-depth information on the latest scientific breakthroughs.  And where they might struggle with esoteric science, there are a growing number of resources that translate and repackage the knowledge into more manageable chunks.  As a consequence, science and technology are being democratized.

It’s still a relatively select community that is benefiting from this increasing access to information.  But the day is quite possibly coming when the current intellectual hierarchies will begin to crumble, and a new science and technology order will emerge.

Secondly, advances in modern communication are revolutionizing the exchange of ideas. Ideas propagate along lines of communication and change individuals and groups who come into contact with them.  In the past, geographical and technological barriers have limited the growth and influence of ideas around the world.  But with the advent of Web 2.0 and whatever comes next, traditional barriers are being blown away.  And as a result, new ideas are spreading and potentially changing how people think and behave faster and more unpredictably than ever before.

This new interconnectedness will have profound implications on global society.  And this will include a clear impact on science and technology—one that we are already seeing.  Through advances in global communication, individuals and groups will form opinions and ideas on emerging science and technology as new knowledge and abilities are developed.  In effect, the old intellectual command and control model is disappearing.  Which means that the debate over how science is done, what areas of science are pursued, and which new technologies are developed (and how) is now very public, and very global.  And there is no guarantee that the participants will have the same understanding of or respect for hard data as the people generating them.

This global exchange of ideas leads into the third way in which advances in communication will affect science and technology: Decentralization. Advancing communication is empowering citizens to influence the course of science and technology in ways that transcend traditional boundaries.  If a group of people decide they don’t like a new technology, it’s relatively easy for them to mobilize and hinder the progress of that technology.  It happened with genetically modified organisms, and there have been concerns that it could happen in other areas like nanotechnology or synthetic biology (for example).  And with this increasing decentralized influence, scientists can scream and shout until they are blue in the face about the authority of hard data—if people don’t want something, it ain’t going to happen.

Which means that if science and technology are to be used wisely and beneficially over the next century, this new communication landscape needs to be understood and navigated.

In the original lecture on which this series is based, I used two examples to illustrate the implications of rapidly evolving global communication—one rather trivial, the other slightly less so.

First, I wanted to illustrate the rapidity with which communication networks are growing around the world, and how information and ideas propagate along these.  I chose Twitter, and one particular user; the British comedian and raconteur Stephen Fry—this is the trivial example.

The growth of interest in Twitter has been phenomenal, and only matched by the growth in stature of users like Stephen Fry (or to use his Twitter persona, @stephenfry).  For the uninitiated, Twitter builds on text messaging by allowing users to send messages of 140 characters or less to other users.  Any message you post can be read by anyone else, although it is delivered directly to your “followers.”  And likewise, any message posted by someone you “follow” is delivered directly to you.  You can then (if you so choose) decide to redirect—or “ReTweet”—that message to your own followers.

In this way a complex web of rapid global communication is established.

Four weeks ago when I was preparing to speak in Oxford, @stephenfry had the fifth highest following on Twitter—with around 280,000 followers.  It’s a testament to the growth of the medium that now—just four weeks later—he is 22nd in the popularity stakes (with 380,000 followers).  But the ranking is not important.  Think, for a moment, of the reach @stephenfry has if he comes up with a bright idea and posts it on Twitter.  380,000 people will receive and (hopefully) read this new nugget of information.  Some of them will pass it on—especially if it’s a good one.  And some of these will pass it on in turn, perhaps embellishing the idea.  The result is a web of nodes and connections that favor the propagation and evolution of ideas over a potentially vast number of people.

The top-subscribed Twitter user is currently @cnnbrk (breaking news from CNN) with 820,000 followers—more than the circulation of a small newspaper and climbing by over 12,000 followers a day.  Just imagine the reach of ideas propagated through this network, especially as they get picked up and pass on by other power users.

Twitter is just one example of how people are interacting through the web and information and ideas are propagating in ways that are completely alien to how the world worked a few years ago.  But there’s another side to this.  A flood of information with inadequate filtering and interpretation is simply noise, and becomes more ineffective the more of it there is.  For the communication revolution to go anywhere, there need to be new ways of handing the mass of information we are exposed to.

Not surprisingly, this is happening.  The second example here is just one of many where new innovations are helping to assimilate this flood of data.  It comes from Pranav Mistry in Patti Maes’ group at the MIT Media Lab, and is part of the Sixth Sense project:

[For a fuller explanation of what you are seeing, check out Patti Maes’ TED video]

What you see is an attempt to contextualize the mass of data available over the web, by using complex information collection, processing, retrieval and presentation.  The system comprises a video camera, projector and web-enabled phone, worn by the user.  By integrating all three components, the wearer can now interact with the web in a very intuitive and context-specific manner—almost as if there was an additional sense reaching out into cyber space.

Using interactive systems like this—which I guarantee are going to become very sophisticated very fast—the door is opened to exchanging information, ideas and influence between real and virtual communities around the globe in ways which will have a profound impact on how we live our lives.  This combination of information and interactive processing is perhaps what makes this “C” such a powerful agent for change when it comes to science and technology.  But powerful as it is, the influence of communication is enhanced significantly by the third “C”—Control.

Over the next few posts, I’ll be exploring this idea of control in more depth.

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Coupling: Actions and consequences in a shrinking world

Next: Control: Gaining mastery over the world at the finest level

[Updated 4/8/09 - slide of MIT Sixth Sense system added]

Part 2 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

In the previous post in this series I introduced the idea of the three “C’s:” Coupling Communication and Control—three factors that together challenge conventional ideas on how science and technology are best developed and used within society.  Following on from that introduction, I want to focus more closely on the first of these: Coupling.

I haven’t actually got much to say here that is new or unfamiliar—most of the new stuff will probably come when I reach the third “C”—Control.  In fact, the concepts buried in the idea of coupling are somewhat obvious.  But that doesn’t make them any less significant.

Very simply, coupling refers to the interconnectedness between society’s actions and global environmental re-actions…

Up until recently, it was assumed that the world was so large, and humanity so small, that whatever we did would simply be absorbed by the Earth.  Oceans, the atmosphere, the planet, were so massive that at worst our actions would cause minor blips in the system, which would dissipate over time.

We now know that this is not the case.  There is a complex dynamic between people and the Earth that has existed for millennia.  But this coupling wasn’t  apparent while the global population was relatively low and resource demands less excessive.

In the past, the lag between human actions and environmental reactions tended to be long and resulting changes gradual. This is no longer the case.  The global population will hit 7 billion people in a few years—fifty years ago it was less than half this.  And resource demands per capita have rocketed while supplies have not, meaning that today’s 6 billion people are stressing the system to a far greater extent than a mere doubling of the population would suggest.

The result is a closer coupling between out actions and the Earth’s reactions than ever before in the history of humanity.  The current implications of this ever-closer coupling are clear, and include all the usual suspects:  Increasing global pollution, acidification of the oceans, rising CO2 levels, global warming.

This coupling is getting stronger, the time lag between actions and responses is getting shorter, and the challenges of predicting and responding to society-induced changes are getting increasingly complex.

And because we are part of the system, these global changes are in turn affecting us—coupling works both ways.

Basic physics provides a simple illustration of this.  I was in two minds about showing the video below because, lets face it, its less than polished (you’ll see what I mean if you watch it).  But it does illustrate the coupling issue rather neatly—as long as the analogy isn’t stretched too far.

Coupled oscillators as an illustration of coupling between society and the Earth

What you see are a pair of coupled oscillators—cobbled together from garden twine and two Orangina bottles.  Together, they demonstrate a physics phenomenon where energy is transferred back and forth between two identical oscillating systems—pendulums in this case.

The experiment starts off with just one of the pendulums swinging.  The second seems to barely move, no matter what the first does.  But over time, the second pendulum begins to be affected by the first one, and starts to oscillate with ever-larger swings.  Then as the second pendulum gets into its stride, it begins in turn to drive the first one.  And so the cycle goes.

The analogy to humanity and the Earth is obvious.  Our actions have seemed inconsequential in the past, but they inevitably lead to environmental re-actions.  These in turn end up impacting back on us.  The analogy does fall apart rather quickly if pushed too far.  But it’s a useful reminder that there is two-way feedback between our actions and the environment we live in, and that over time our actions come back to haunt us unless we proceed with care.

This coupling is cumulative, it is non-linear, and it is increasing rapidly as our demands on the planet grow.  Which means that the consequences of what we do, and the global impacts of those consequences, are becoming harder to predict and control.

Managing this coupling will take all of our skill, and will not be possible without significant advances in science and technology.  Which is why no discussion of science and technology and their role in society can afford to neglect it.

But the story doesn’t end there.  Growing global demands are strengthening the coupling between people and the planet.  But other factors are also playing into this complex relationship; magnifying the challenges emerging in an already serious situation.  One of these factors is the rapid evolution of global communications systems, which is shaking up how information and ideas flow around the globe.

This virtual coupling between people will be the focus of the next post in this series.

Notes

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Science, technology and the three “C’s:” Communication, Coupling and Control

Next: Communication: Science and technology in a connected world

Part 1 of a series on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

We live in a crowded, science and technology-dependent word.  And things aren’t getting any better!  The global population is currently around 6.8 billion.  Over the next four years it’s projected to grow to over 7 billion.  And by 2050, the US Census Bureau estimates there will be over 9.5 billion men women and children on the planet; all of them expecting food, water, shelter, and a first world standard of living.  The only way such demands can be met—if indeed they can be (and it’s a big “if”)—is through the increasingly sophisticated and strategic use of science and technology.

The level of scientific knowledge and technological ability that exists now underpins modern society.  Remove it, and things collapse.  But what is less obvious is that science and technology need to continually develop in a changing world.  As new challenges, needs and wants arise, we need a steady stream of new knowledge and new technology innovation.  Without science progress and technology innovation, our ability to sustain a healthy global society will not keep pace with the challenges to achieving this.

Of course, this is nothing new.  Science, technology and society have been intertwined for tens of thousands of years.  Homo sapiens are tool-makers and tool users—technology is in our blood.  Our history is one of progression through technology innovation—from early tools, to husbandry, to the industrial revolution and on to synthetic chemicals manufacture, nuclear power, semiconductor fabrication, and so on.

Some would say we’ve done pretty well out of this fascination with science and technology.  And by all accounts we have.  On a global scale, life expectancies are longer and quality of life is higher than ever before.

But this isn’t necessarily a sustainable trend.  With a growing population, dwindling resources and increasing demands on them, the pressures on science and technology to deliver the good are mounting.  At the same time, the world is changing in ways that could well stretch established approaches to ensuring adequate science and technology innovation to breaking point.

Take for instance the rate at which knowledge and ideas are now spreading, crossing boundaries, and influencing people. Or the increasingly strong links between human actions and environmental re-actions. And how about the ability of scientists to bend the material world to their every whim, even down to the scale of atoms and molecules?  In each of these cases, we are achieving more now than ever before in human history.  And the rate of progress is accelerating.  Separately, they challenge the effectiveness of conventional approaches to using science and technology in the service of society.  Together, they could well shake things up so much that established ways of doing things are no longer responsive to society’s needs.

These are the three “C’s:” Communication, Coupling and Control.  Communication: the flow and influence of information and ideas between people and institutions.  Coupling: the ever-closer relationship between society and the Earth.  And Control: our rapidly developing ability to control our surroundings from the atomic level through to the planetary scale.  Over the next few blogs in this series I will be talking about each “C” in more depth, and how together they potentially change the game when it comes to science and technology.

Next up: Coupling: Actions and consequences in a shrinking world

Notes

“Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century” is a series of blogs drawing on a recent lecture given at the James Martin School in Oxford.  This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be posting a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.

Previously: Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century

Next: Coupling: Actions and consequences in a shrinking world

[3/19/09 correction - when the page was initially posted, it listed the third blog in this series - on communication - as being next]

Like it or not, society is dependent on science and technology.  The only way we can cram 6 billion people plus onto the earth and use resources at the rate we do, is through the support of scientific discovery and technology innovation.  Take our technology-based infrastructure away and civilization as we know it would collapse.

Perhaps more worrying, our dependency on science and technology is accelerating.  The world’s population continues to grow, lifestyle expectations are going up, and supporting technologies are becomes increasingly sophisticated.  But this “progress” can only be sustained through increasing the rate with which new discoveries are made and new technology innovations are implemented.

At some point this cycle of technology addiction probably needs to be broken if society is to avoid a rather nasty crash.  But I suspect that such a crash is some way off yet.  And it is entirely plausible that the solution for avoiding such a crash will itself arise from technology-based innovation.

Which means that if global society is to continue to mature and prosper, we have to get the whole science and technology enterprise right.

The only alternative is to face a radical “recalibration” of society, leading to a population level and demands on resources that are more in keeping with the Earth’s load-carrying capacity.

Assuming that we want to avoid a rapid and potentially catastrophic reduction in the world’s population, we need to ask whether the way we currently “do” science and technology is good enough.  And if it isn’t what needs to change?

Rethinking science and technology for the 21st century is going to be the subject of a series of blogs over the next few weeks—I’m afraid this is only the teaser!  I’ll be drawing on a recent lecture at the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University, which means that if you want a heads-up, you can always browse through the slides [PDF, 8.9 MB].  But I should warn you that the story might not be that clear from the slides alone.

This is a bit of an experiment—the serialization of a lecture, and a prelude to a more formal academic paper.  But hopefully it will be both interesting and useful.  I’ll be aiming to publish a “rethinking science and technology” blog every week or so, interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of stuff you’ve come to expect from 2020science.  First off will be the framing the problem, and introducing the “three C’s”—look out for it over the next week.

In the meantime, here’s the abstract from the original lecture, to whet your appetite:

As we move further into the 21st century, we are facing a confluence of three factors that will shake up the interface between society and science.  Nanoscale science and technology are enabling unprecedented control over matter, allowing living and non-living systems to be manipulated and used in radical new ways.  Innovative new approaches to communication and networking are facilitating the emergence of virtual partnerships that transcend geographical, organizational and social boundaries.  And society is now so closely coupled to the biosphere that our actions are stressing the system to a greater extent than ever before in human history.

This confluence of control, communication and coupling raises major challenges for society in the 21st century.   But it also contains the seeds of effective solutions.  However, to nurture and grow these seeds, new approaches to science and technology innovation will be needed.  These will include developing research agendas that are driven by social challenges, engaging citizens through building constituencies, and cultivating scientists with a clear sense of civic responsibility.

Update: The full series of posts on rethinking science and technology for the 21st century can be accessed here.