Foresight and Opportunity
Posted by Jeriaska on January 10th, 2009
The 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend offered fifteen intense hours of mind-blowing creativity. From the biggest picture of tomorrow’s web, to the tiniest picture of nanotechnology, the emphasis was on how to steer rapid change for the benefit of civilization, instead of being run over by it. Brad Templeton introduced the second day of the unconference organized by the Foresight Nanotechnology Institute, touching on the tremendous opportunities attending living in the midst of a historical revolution in converging technologies.
The following transcript of Brad Templeton’s pre-Vision Weekend presentation has not been approved by the speaker. Video is also available.
Foresight and Opportunity
I’m on the board of the Foresight Institute along with Jim Bennett, Jim Von Ehr, Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation, Christine and Ed Niehaus. This organization was founded around twenty years ago, coming up on twenty-five, based on the ideas that were in Eric Drexler’s book Engines of Creation. A remarkable book, it talked about truly revolutionary concepts and realized that we are at the dawn of a revolution.
Now, that is not a normal circumstance. I don’t think in the 1800’s people were walking down the street saying:
“Hello, Mr. Wilson!”
“Hello, Mr. Smith!”
“How is the Industrial Revolution going?”
“Oh, very well, very well!”
We know that we’re in a revolution here. We know that a big revolution is coming—not just one. One in nanotech is coming, one in artificial intelligence is probably coming, one in biotech is coming, and I think that is not even the full list. This organization is devoted to understanding these things, both the benefits and the problems of them—a little bit unusual, in that we try and do both.
If you think there is a revolution coming, then you have a unique opportunity. When a revolution is coming, it is a unique juncture in history. It’s a time when a small effort by the right people can have a tremendous effect on the future—ideally, tremendous benefit for the future. This is a very special time, and you are lucky enough to know that you are in that time. Now, I hope all of you look into your own minds and decide that you do have a duty to help improve things, help change things, and help understand what these technologies are going to mean to society.
If you think you have that duty, then I want you to work on it. I want you to try and do something to change things for the better… but a lot of you are busy people and you can’t do everything yourself. I’ve come to you with a proposal. You might want to outsource this duty to other people that work professionally full-time at doing that. That is the staff of this organization. If you feel that you do have that duty, I think you might want to consider, if you can’t do the work yourself, becoming a senior associate or donating at a higher level to this organization.
We have been working, coming on twenty-five years, on projects like for example that Roadmap that we put together and was just released in preliminary form. We are very interested in how molecular nanotechnology is going to be developed, and we felt it was important to have real scientific research laid out about how that is going to happen. This, and the open source physical security project, is the kind of thing we have wanted to do for the future. If you feel you have that duty, I hope that we can help you achieve the goals you want to achieve because you don’t have the time to do it all yourself.
Please come to our website or talk to us, especially if you have a large donation. Now, even if you don’t donate, we’re still going to work on this stuff, so it’s not compulsory. Thanks very much everyone for coming because we think we are working on the most important problem of our time. If you came here, you probably agree with that already, so thanks for coming.
