Oxford University Press, 2010, - 304 p. (Анг. язык)
The authors of this book are conceed about the new scale on which many of these pressing problems are now manifesting themselves. Because technology has been a key factor in triggering these issues in the first place, we believe it should also be part of solving them and of preventing similar problems from arising in the future. The scale of the challenges is different from anything that we humans have so far experienced, and so the solutions need to be different, too—even in the case of problems we thought we had already beaten. We might know how to cure a virus infection, for instance, but curing billions of people simultaneously is a very different challenge and one that will require new technology. We clearly couldn’t cover every field of technology ourselves, so we talked to numerous scientific and technological experts and visionaries about how they’d like the world to be in 20 years. We asked them to explore the kind of research that will be necessary in the years ahead and to put it in its broader context. Do we have the means to influence the course of history? What breakthroughs will be needed to make the world a better place? Despite their very different areas of research, the experts presented ideas that displayed a number of important parallels. They showed us that many processes have become interrelated and that global networks of all kinds are now intertwined. This means that a disturbance in, say, the Inteet now has the potential to disrupt the global financial system. Science and technology are closely implicated in the growing complexity of key issues — something that complicates our view of both the problems and their solutions.
In the course of our discussions with the experts, we gradually realized, therefore, that the relevance of networks and complexity is much wider than we thought, providing us with a new way of viewing problems and solutions. Although this has yet to be fully appreciated in many branches of science, interest in the approach we describe here is definitely increasing. It also presents us with new tools with which to face the future. Complex processes lack regularity and predictability, so we certainly can’t predict the future. Nevertheless, complexity science has a great deal to teach us about breakthroughs, changes, and pattes of influence. Research into complex dynamical systems has grown into a new science since the late 1980s. It is now common in physics, chemistry, and mathematics and is gradually finding its way into other disciplines as well. Fresh understanding of the regularities underlying complex systems offers us a new perspective on sustainability, stability, and crisis-prevention methods — a new way of looking forward that can help us identify key issues for 2030.
The authors of this book are conceed about the new scale on which many of these pressing problems are now manifesting themselves. Because technology has been a key factor in triggering these issues in the first place, we believe it should also be part of solving them and of preventing similar problems from arising in the future. The scale of the challenges is different from anything that we humans have so far experienced, and so the solutions need to be different, too—even in the case of problems we thought we had already beaten. We might know how to cure a virus infection, for instance, but curing billions of people simultaneously is a very different challenge and one that will require new technology. We clearly couldn’t cover every field of technology ourselves, so we talked to numerous scientific and technological experts and visionaries about how they’d like the world to be in 20 years. We asked them to explore the kind of research that will be necessary in the years ahead and to put it in its broader context. Do we have the means to influence the course of history? What breakthroughs will be needed to make the world a better place? Despite their very different areas of research, the experts presented ideas that displayed a number of important parallels. They showed us that many processes have become interrelated and that global networks of all kinds are now intertwined. This means that a disturbance in, say, the Inteet now has the potential to disrupt the global financial system. Science and technology are closely implicated in the growing complexity of key issues — something that complicates our view of both the problems and their solutions.
In the course of our discussions with the experts, we gradually realized, therefore, that the relevance of networks and complexity is much wider than we thought, providing us with a new way of viewing problems and solutions. Although this has yet to be fully appreciated in many branches of science, interest in the approach we describe here is definitely increasing. It also presents us with new tools with which to face the future. Complex processes lack regularity and predictability, so we certainly can’t predict the future. Nevertheless, complexity science has a great deal to teach us about breakthroughs, changes, and pattes of influence. Research into complex dynamical systems has grown into a new science since the late 1980s. It is now common in physics, chemistry, and mathematics and is gradually finding its way into other disciplines as well. Fresh understanding of the regularities underlying complex systems offers us a new perspective on sustainability, stability, and crisis-prevention methods — a new way of looking forward that can help us identify key issues for 2030.