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Global Design for Geoethical Nanotechnology

By Natasha Vita-More

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Cultural Diversity
It takes a think tank of disparate, diverse and complementary thinkers to solve a code. We have a big code to crack in the Vita-More world today and a lot of it has to deal with people who are hungry, people who need water, people who need care, and people who need human rights. We have a big responsibility. But we cannot let that responsibility deter us from our natural path as designers in thinking.

In dealing with cultural diversity, we need to think about the recent discontinuities and the constants in society. A recent discontinuity would be terrorism, the attack on the United States and our response to that. The constant is that we are afraid of change. We continue to be afraid of change no matter how much change we keep on making throughout our lifetime from the earliest days to today and into tomorrow. Change is something to which we must perpetually adapt.

Inclusion
Regarding change, we must ask who is involved? Who are the stakeholders? What are the trends? The stakeholders are those of you reading this article right now. Because you care, you are a part of the process. Stakeholders are also those who do not care and are not part of the process because peripherally, they will be involved and carried along. FM 2030 (the first transhuman) said people may be going into the future not head-first but rear-first. They will be dragged by their belt loops or bootstraps, pulled into the future whether they like it or not. And this is usually what happens. It would be more preferential if we could bring everyone with us happily and smiling, but that does not always happen. The trends would be right now for us to figure out ways to bring people into the future so that they are part of the design process. Figure 2 illustrates all the players that must be included in gobal design.

Vita-more Figure 2
Figure 2

Preferred Futures
We are a bit concerned about the emerging issues and potential events that could come about. These include ramifications of runaway nanotechnology, runaway assemblers, and molecular engineering - and areas that could tamper with the human body, such as nanorobots that go into the body or into the cosmos. The question is: How will nanotechnology be used?

The new ideas and critical uncertainties are the areas about which I care most because the new ideas are the plans that we have not quite seen yet. They are the potentially impossible futures that once we put our mind to and work together to solve, we will be able to develop events we would like to realize. These are preferred futures. And there is not one preferred future, but a myriad of preferred futures. We need to design a vantage point to see these preferred futures in order to bring them into alignment so that one or two may happen. Hopefully, the ones that happen will be those that will be the most beneficial to the global design of society.

Sociology, economics, technology, politics – these are the areas about which most of us argue and on what most of us tend to build our own theories and philosophies. When we think about the political arena for the future, we know that it is somehow tied into economics. We know that it is also tied into how society trades. We know that it ties into our human rights and into the ability of society to accept and move with rapid technological change. So the question is how will molecular nanotechnology work into these four areas of society from which we develop forecasts, strategic plans, and frameworks for the future?

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