Saturday 2 August 2008

Future Global Dangers

I often blog about positive ways that I see technology influencing the future.  It is important to balance this with how it might also be misused or offer risk to society too.  It is more and more likely as time goes on, that there will be a significant danger posed to a very large number of people either deliberately (e.g. through terrorism) or accidentally (e.g. an experiment which goes horribly wrong).  Technology is offering more possibilities for each of these while also offering a larger scale of potential impact.  

Even aside from technology, and despite there having been recent decades of relative harmony and peace in much of the world, there is a significant likelihood that some very undesirable wars may occur in future decades, perhaps over the scarcity of water for example.  But technology has a role to play here, both in bringing terrible scenes of the scars of conflict into people's living rooms so that they don't forget how bad it can be, but also in addressing those global issues which may otherwise be the causes of war.  

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