Archaeo-Futurists can claim to be true realists since the present is nothing but the immediate end-result of the past which constantly absorbs the future. Thus we have no choice but to blend what we have kept or wish to retain from before with what is coming into our lives that we cannot or do not wish to reject.
Bill Joy, the inventor of Java wrote in a widely commented article in Wired Magazine (April 2000) that three technologies are the most critical and the most threatening for our future: biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics. Indeed in the decade that has almost passed, they have made phenomenal advances and a country like Japan, for one, has focused much of its R & D on the promises enshrined in those three very young disciplines. Their synthesis can lead to the creation of entities that will be both machines and living beings on a gigantic scale as on a microscopic one.
Even more than transforming our biosphere, they are already beginning to transform us, physically and mentally and many are predicting the birth in the coming years of an Internet of Things, - as an outgrowth of the Internet of Data that is coming of age - which we have trouble conceiving because it would entail the ability to "manifest' or create all sorts of goods, and not only services, on demand through the wizardy of nanotech.
Clearly for people who will be more than human in a partly non-natural, synthetic and virtual world, new political and economic forms of organization will have to emerge since ours are already proving inadequate.
Jan Amkreutz (in World Affairs, Vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn 2010) writes of reality being replaced by "digeality", the virtual universe of our creation and of electronic bytes replacing or at least controlling genes as we can not only read the DNA code of life but write it as well, following the pioneering demonstration carried out by Craig Venter and his team. What system of governance will be suitable to the post-human creatures that our grandchildren, if not our young children are likely to become?
A sobering but not unrealistic observation is that some of the greatest beneficiaries of many of the newest technologies are the organized crime systems which are challenging states and supra-national "official" bodies when they don't merge with them through a noxious symbiosis which produces Mafia-states denounced by leaders as diverse as President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Felipe Calderon of Mexico.
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