مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Most professional, academic, and scientific disciplines hold unrealistic views of the future beyond a 15 to 20 year timeframe. The reason why is that these disciplines typically fail to recognize the full implications of accelerating growth of information technology and the technological change it catalyzes. Though definitions of technology vary substantially, the general story of technological progress marks the evolution of our ability to manipulate the material world with ever-greater power and precision using practical knowledge and tools (Drexler, 2013; Li-Hua, 2013). In recent decades computing has played an important role as a general-purpose technology and key enabler that has facilitated the development of a wide array of other technologies, from telecommunications and the Internet to medicine and renewable energy (Lipsey et al., 2005).

Going forward, computing will play a central role in giving rise to machine intelligence and robotics, biotechnology and regenerative medicine, 3D printing and atomically precise manufacturing, fully immersive virtual reality, decentralized clean energy production, and many other socially, economically, politically, and environmentally disruptive technologies. Because improvement in the power, cost, and size of computers is accelerating, many of these technologies that have long been relegated to science fiction are likely to become a reality far sooner than most disciplines imagine.

So while typically anticipated timeframes put many of these technologies so far in the future (on the order of centuries) that their implications may be dismissed as irrelevant to present generations, more thoughtful consideration of the accelerating growth of computing shows that even the more radical of these technologies are likely to arrive within just a few decades. Policymakers, planners, professionals, scientists, and scholars therefore have an obligation to take the implications of radical technological change seriously today.