AC/UNU Millennium Project
Updating the Global Challenges Facing Humanity
14. Science and Technology
How can scientific and technological breakthroughs be accelerated to improve the human condition?

This is the short description of the challenge as appears in the print version of the 2006 State of the Future report. The more complete version of this challenge along with actions to address it, graphs, and indicators to measure change is available on the CD-ROM included with the report.
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General Description

The world needs an international process to focus government, corporate, and university scientific, engineering, and medical resources to achieve the eight UN Millennium Development Goals. Accelerating S&T advances make far more things possible than most are willing to believe; hence decisions to apply scientific breakthroughs to improve the human condition are continually missed. Photons have been slowed and accelerated; medical robots are used in surgery; adult stem cells have been regressed to act like embryonic cells to repair damaged brains and other body parts; faint magnetic signals from a single electron buried inside a solid sample have been detected; organic transistors with a single-molecule channel length are now visible; microbial fuel cells have been demonstrated; and humans with implanted chips in their brains have controlled devices by thought alone.

Just as lines of code were written to create software to do amazing things, genetic code may be written to create life to do even more amazing things, such as producing hydrogen fuel instead of oxygen from photosynthesis. Artificial organs may be constructed by depositing living cells, layer by layer, using dot matrix printers, in a manner similar to 3-D prototyping. The cellular and genetic abnormalities responsible for schizophrenia, depression, and other mental diseases are being identified. Ten-gigabyte hard drives for cell phones are coming soon. Genetically modified viruses can coat themselves with electrically conducting metals to form nano-wires that self-assemble into battery components. The future synergies among nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science will change the prospects for civilization.

Imagine what could come from breakthrough synergies between pharmaceuticals and biotech, biology and nano-chips, brain physiology and artificial intelligence, and genetics and information science. New capacities in nanotechnology, robotics, and medicine are coming together to eventually create nanobots the size of blood cells that can enter the blood stream in the billions and diagnose and provide therapies throughout the body and possibly improve intelligence and provide 3-D internal virtual reality from inside-out. For the longer range, quantum phenomena and entanglement are being probed. Quantum physicists are experimenting with teleporting individual photons and demonstrating a method that may ultimately teleport two near-identical copies of the original. Astronomers are probing the possibilities of dark energy, a cosmological force in opposition to gravity.

The factors accelerating all these changes are themselves accelerating, which will make the past 25 years look slow compared with the next. Exploding scientific capacities around the world, R&D outsourcing, and international collaboratories via Internet2 are globalizing S&T. Yet the risks from acceleration and globalization of S&T are enormous (see CD Chapter 3.5 for global 2025 S&T scenarios) and give rise to future ethical issues. For example, do we have the right to clone ourselves, to create thousands of new life forms, and to claim scientific sovereignty in basic research? (See CD Chapter 4 Science and Technology Management Issues)

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Approaches to address this challenge

Challenge 14 will be addressed seriously when the funding of R&D for societal needs reaches parity with funding for other purposes and when an international science and technology organization is established that routinely connects world S&T knowledge for use in R&D priority setting and legislation. Such a system could make political and media decisionmakers more S&T-savvy by bringing together the world’s knowledge in a more user-friendly fashion to illustrate risks, opportunities, and a range of speculation on items on a cumulative basis. It could facilitate transparent international scientific assessments of controversial areas such as bionanotech and, wherever they are found feasible and desirable, make it clear how these would improve the human condition. Currently the InterAcademy Panel, a worldwide network of 90 science academies, is increasing access to S&T information and cooperation around the world; MIT offers its education materials free on the Internet; and all should support basic research and development of new theoretical principles to provide the growing pool of knowledge from which applied science draws its insights to improve the human condition.

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Regional Considerations

Africa: African governments pledged 1% of their GDP to support an integrated plan for the future development of science in Africa over the next five years organized by NEPAD, which is also creating science, technology, and innovation indicators to help national decisionmaking. It is hoped that the international community will provide $3 billion over 10 years to establish S&T centers of excellence. ICSU has opened an office in Africa to focus on health and human well-being, hazards such as pollution and deforestation, sustainable energy, and global climate change.

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Asia and Oceania: If current trends continue, in 2010 China will account for 23% of the world’s R&D expenditures. It currently has more than 50 universities, 20 institutes, and 300 enterprises engaged in nanotechnology R&D and plans to complete an additional 30 S&T parks by 2010. China, Pakistan, and South Korea pay their scientists incentive fees for publishing professional journals. There are more IT engineers in Bangalore than in Silicon Valley. Japan launched the first test Furoshiki satellite as an experimental method to make and maintain space solar satellites.

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Europe: German and Japanese scientists sent data at a record rate of 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link. The EC has begun the “human mind project” as interdisciplinary research to understand the essence of being human versus some other animal. The group was part of the Commission’s PATHFINDER initiative, part of the new and emerging science and technologies activity of the Sixth Framework Programme. By 2010, the EU plans to increase R&D expenditures to 3% of GDP and attract an additional 700,000 researchers. More than 500,000 scientists have left Russia over the past 15 years.

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Latin America: The region averages 0.4% of GDP for S&T development but plans to increase that to 3% by 2010 and should improve its public-private R&D cooperation, regional research networks, and incentives for private investment in local R&D.

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North America: Religious fundamentalist politics is a threat to the continued excellence of United States science. Old issues of evolution versus creationism have resurfaced in a trial of “intelligent design” in which the judge ruled that it was creationism in another form, nonscientific, and that it should not replace evolutionary theory in public school science classes. Technological development could become a competitive “sport” (e.g., MIT’s robot competitions). The Tech Museum in San Jose offers $250,000 in prizes for technological innovations to benefit humanity.

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Graph: Estimated R&D Expenditures (billions of dollars)
in OECD and Cooperating Non-member Countries

Source: NSF, Science and Energy Indicators 2006


If you have a suggestion for a better graphic representation to measure change on this challenge, please indicate the source(s) of data:


Additional Comments
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Thank you for your participation. The results will be sent to you in the 2007 State of the Future in August 2007.



Survey conducted by the Millennium Project of the ACUNU