CINUM 2007 - Digital Civilizations
I am back from CINUM 2007 in Margaux, where 20 international experts (designers of the future) and 100 international decision-makers gathered and worked together based on 4 scenarios for the future of Digital Civilizations. Digital in a wide sense: we discussed several issues related to many emergent technologies and their current, possible and desirable impact on society. As last year, this was a very interesting, dense, challenging and fruitful workshop. This was the last year of the 3-years CINUM project - I look forward to seeing the final report and the plan for CINUM followup actions.
The 4 scenarios had been elaborated by the organizers before the workshop, based on current trends: the more and more pressing environmental problems, the perceived inability to cope with global issues, the acceleration of technology development, the many examples of spontaneous organization enabled by networks, the North-South divide, the (inevitable?) conflicts between management and freedom, the (inevitable?) conflicts between globalization and regionalization, etc.
I wish to thank the two main organizers Marcel Desvergne and Daniel Kaplan (in the picture above). I also wish to thank Hervé le Guyader, Jean-François Laplume and Thierry Ulmet, and apologize to Hervé and Thierry for often confusing their names.
Will we manage to find solutions before 2030? If no, we have 1 - Collapse: current trends continue and become worse. terrorism, economic crisis, environmental catastrophes, fragmentation of power, protectionism and restrictions on movement, emergence of local communities. If yes, we may have 2 - Imperialism: some nations (guess) manage to impose their views on others, and enforce a more sustainable development phase. This new phase of history might be characterized by rational decision making on a planetary scale, in which case we have a 3 - New enlightenment under a benevolent (?) strong governance. Alternatively, it might be shaped my market forces with 4 - 100,000 Flowers blooming in a less controlled way. The maturity of the scenario making work done by the organizers is shown by the fact that none of the scenarios is entirely “good” or “bad”. In fact, even the first scenario (Collapse) has some attractive features and some participants considered it as the least bad. My own list? I guess 4, 1, 3, 2.
Last year I gave a talk about transhumanism. This year, transhumanist excelsior Anders Sandberg gave a talk on human enhancement. Anders’ talk was relatively sober and “restrained” in the sense that he stopepd before covering the most “exotic” and potentially controversial ideas of transhumanists. Of course, the most radical ideas were there below the surface for those who wanted to discuss them.
On the basis of the 4 scenarios, the participants were divided in groups and explored the scenarios in more depth, with the objective of extracting relevant challenges and, after a vote, choosing 7 important challenges to be retained as the final output of CINUM. The challenge produced by the working group led by Hervé, in which Anders and I participated with many other persons each with a different philosophical position, was “Defining an ethics for human augmentation” (my suggestion to use the more frequently used “enhancement” in the English formulation was rejected because the group felt that “augmentation” is more clear). I was quite pleased to see that this challenge was the one most voted by the audience. This does not necessarily mean that most participants think that human augmentation is a good thing, and I am sure some of the participants who voted for this challenge think that human augmentation is a bad thing that should be prevented by an ethical framework. But it does mean that more and more people are persuaded that human augmentation, or enhancement, is one of the big issues of our time. The importance of the issue is expressed by Daniel in the videoclip below.
The other 6 challenges are focused on environmental issues (giving everyone the means to measure her or his environmental impact, developing a global “catastrophe plan"), improving the interaction between remote people by developing means to reperesent a wider range of sensorial inputs electronically, and “wikizing” education and politics (linking institutions and networks in a complex world, raising the global level of knowledge, giving space to dissent - I liked this one, especially in its first formulation as “encouraging disorder and messiness”, and voted for it).
Some points that I consider important: of course environmental issues played an important role in the discussion. These issues are terribly important and everyone should, in my opinion, do her or his best to understand, measure and minimize her or his environmental impact. At the same time, there are also other important issues. This is why I resist proposals to enforce “environmental correctness” by near-dictatorial means like it is sadly the case today for political correctness. I think low environmental impact is a very useful measure of how a person contributes to a better world, but it cannot and should not be the only measure. In other words, an ecologically correct serial killer may be ecologically correct, but is still a serial killer. In general, I do not like the forced separation between natural and artificial, often used in the sense that natural is good and artificial is bad. We are a part of nature as much as any endangered species and, unPC as it may be, we are _more_ important than other parts of nature. At least from our point of view, which is the only one that matters. On another issue, I was very pleased to see a certain dissatisfaction with the established concentration of power in the hands of old nation states, which are demonstrating their inability to deal with pressing problems on a global geopolitical scale, and a certain feeling that smaller communities based on territory (regions) or ideology (distributed communities) may be able to do better.
Posted by G.P. on 10/08 at 05:15 AM