On the one hand the period of the late 19^th and the 20^th centuries has experienced new technologies that have brought about changes in the lives of most of the people of the world arguably more significant than those of any other similar period since the Renaissance. Innovations in transportation, communication, and information processing have brought the people of the world closer together. The Internet and e-mail have made close neighbors of everyone. Scientific progress and improved methods of manufacturing have yielded materials and machines not even imagined two generations ago. Modern methods of health care have improved the quality of life and expanded the dimensions of life expectancy, especially of those who have access to good sanitation, good nutrition, and up to—date medical technology. Increases in the efficiency of agriculture have managed to stave off the Malthusian tragedy nearly everywhere. We are able to explore our neighbors in the solar system and reach out to the furthest extent of the universe.

On the other hand, new weapons technology has diminished security through the evolution of greatly improved weapons of mass destruction and methods for perpetrating terrorism. The ugly faces of racism and ethnic strife evident everywhere have not diminished significantly anywhere. The gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" continues to widen. International terrorism has managed to span the great Atlantic and Pacific moats. Many of our activities are surely causing irreversible changes in the environment of the earth. It is to wonder how we can managed to maximize the benefits of our technological skill while minimizing the accompanying dangers and unexpected undesirable consequences.

The influence of advancing technology on the lives of all of us will surely continue to grow as a dominant factor partly because technology tends to acquire a life of its own, and partly because it seduces we humans. As we move forward to build our own future, our goal must be accompanied by commitments to evolving a more humane, more altruistic world; to refining our yardstick for success; and to watching carefully over the wider implications of what we are doing.

The opening year of the 21^st century brought the realization that the unprecedented good times were not going to go on forever as the "dot coms" began to melt down and the rate of economic growth was tumbling. Then on the eleventh of September the nation was shocked into the reality that "isolation" was no longer a valid attitude and that membership in the Global Village requires new responsibilities.

The earth is unique in our solar system, and perhaps in our galaxy. It is the only planet capable of supporting life, as we know it. This is because of its unique position relative to the sun in the hierarchy of the solar planets and because of its unique size. The chemical composition of the earth provides the minerals, gases, and water essential for the support of life and for the symbiosis between plants and animals. The particular size of the earth provides it with a gravitational force adequate to maintain a shallow atmosphere of life—supporting gases. Its distance from the sun and the presence of its atmosphere and oceans controls the solar heating, thus making it possible for the entire planet, save the extreme latitudes, to lie within the temperature range of liquid water. How miraculous, but how very fragile a confluence of conditions!

Our planet is a closed system. Other than the solar energy input on the day side responsible for operating all of nature’s machinery, and the heat radiated out to space on the night side, all the materials of the earth are all the materials that ever have been shortly after it cooled from the primeval fireball, and all that ever will be. The form of the materials may be changed, their distribution may be changed, and their chemical combination may be changed, but they will not be replaced or augmented except, perhaps, through human intervention one day by the importation of materials from our planetary neighbors. The consequent life support system, responsible for all living things exists in a delicate balance, easily irreversibly upset by insults from human activity. Our attitude toward the earth's finite resources determines how well we husband these assets for now and for posterity.

According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, at the end of the 5^th day of creation, God gave the following charge to Adam and Eve and their descendents as a kind of stewardship:

Other major religious traditions, notably the Buddha, and the Hindu, are less anthropocentric, viewing humanity’s relation to the earth as a joining among all life rather than the dominance suggested in the Genesis passage. But surely, no matter what our own convictions might be, we all must recognize the awesome presence of some imponderable something, whether it is thought to be divine or mystical, responsible for the existence of life as we know it on this singular speck in infinite space. We are entrusted to be responsible custodians of the precious resources of our planet.

We humans yearn for peace, security from the ravages of unpredictable natural phenomena, for ample food and clothing, good health, long life, leisure to enjoy friends and family. We wish to have freedom from drudgery, to enjoy nature’s beauty, to wonder at the world about us. Our very useful hands, our ability to archive information, and our ability to endow our efforts with aesthetic and spiritual qualities have provided us with opportunities to live comfortably, to enrich our living, and to look after one another. Throughout the evolution of civilization we have employed these faculties to build shelter, provide means of transport and communication, to erect facilities to produce the materials required for everyday life, provide nourishment and health care, and to enhance our cultural and artistic resources. We have learned how to extend the bird songs into symphonies, our daily movement into dances, our gardens into paintings, our caves into glorious buildings.

Technology and its partner, science, provide the avenues along which we accomplish these ends. Of course we must not be so presumptuous as to believe technology to be solely an endeavor of humans. We know that birds build nests, bees fashion hives; and beavers erect elaborate dams. But it is human—sponsored technology that has had the largest impact on the resources of the earth. This is largely a consequence of our exploitation of Earth's resources to create the necessities for the "good life".

This catalogue of human activity also has a dark side. Human qualities of greed, hate, fear, excessive pride, insensitivity, and thirst for power–and perhaps more significant, insecurity–have led us to develop ever more efficient means for destroying life, a penchant for squandering irreplaceable resources, and en route to threaten the capability of the earth to support our ever increasing population. Finally, alas, we are the only species on earth that employs our technological success to conduct large-scale organized aggression against one another.

As our technological evolution has proceeded we have discovered that no technological innovation can accomplish only the one thing for which it is designed. Sooner or later unintended consequences will appear. It is these unintended events that can frustrate or at the very least, minimize our goal. We are, however, not always aware of these potentialities at the outset. Often a very long time elapses before such undesirable results emerge. Thus it is crucial that every new innovation be examined carefully, tested if possible, for potential negative outcomes before embarking on its implementation.

Take, for example, the automobile. It was designed to provide inexpensive, reliable personal transportation, free of the complications accompanying the use of domesticated animals. While it certainly has accomplished that end, it has also, over time, become a major polluter of the air. It is also responsible for paving over the landscape; for the spread of suburban communities at the expense of the inner cities; for the forsaking of the cities by businesses and industries in their flight to the suburbs; for the cluttering of the landscape with acres of parking lots fronting tasteless strips of shops; for the development of deep pockets of urban poverty; for the expenditure of vast amounts of public treasure to accommodate the growing motorized fleet; not to mention 50,000 auto related deaths each year.

Thus, we must be aware, at the dawn of the twenty first century, that our remarkable progress is accompanied by unforeseen hazards; unspeakable cruelties; vastly improved war machines; new levels of terrorism; intensified ethnic and religious strife; serious, perhaps irreversible climate change; the emergence of a vast gulf between the wealth of the population of the more developed countries and that of the impoverished people in places such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, Angola, Bangladesh, Burundi, Afghanistan , Haiti. Mexico–the list is endless. Most of this was unanticipated at the outset but crept upon us while we were looking the other way. If we are to take our role seriously as custodians of this unique habitat, we must strive to remain in charge of our technology, to moderate our infatuation with every incremental change, and as best we can, anticipate consequences beyond each objective. We must be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of the greater good, avoid greed, and place aspirations for economic gain within humane, ethical and moral boundaries.

There are clear signs now of impending technological developments in the next few decades that rival the wildest imagination of science fiction. One goal of the evolution of computers is to make them smart, even to think and reason like humans. Another has been to make the operating elements ever smaller and pack increasingly larger amounts of memory and higher speed into less space. Up to now this was accomplished by modification of the structure of traditional semiconductors and improvement in fabrication techniques. But now we are reaching the ultimate in miniaturization by being able to see, manipulate, and assemble individual atoms and molecules.

Think about it. How is a vegetable created? It is assembled, from a seed through the input of only solar energy and a few abundant inexpensive minerals and gases from the environment. The instructions are contained in a protein, which is part of its genetic makeup. What’s more, the process is self-replicating.

We are now taking the first steps to learn how to emulate these natural processes and actually to manipulate individual atoms to form structures that possess unique properties. Such capability will allow us to produce inexpensive devices with electronic and structural behavior orders of magnitude superior to the best we have today. This new nanotechnology, is already recognized by the US Government as an important priority, an evolving laboratory reality and the beginning of an infant industry.

Cost vs. Benefit: Our obligations to posterity.

If we agree that progress is dependent on improved technology^* and that the introduction of any technological innovation will result in attendant unforeseeable consequences, many of which can be classed as "negative externalities", then how is it possible to decide whether or not to proceed? The answer to this question lies our ability to assess the measure of risk versus benefit. Since no innovation is entirely without risk, an important ingredient in this evaluation is the matter of, "How much risk are we willing to tolerate?" This is not meant to be an argument for adopting the attitude of the 19th Century Luddites who demonstrated against all technological change as undesirable. Rather it is to recognize that we have to evaluate innovation carefully to find a sensible risk—benefit balance; and to adjust our attitude toward our career objectives and toward our day to day participation in our community in an unselfish, responsible manner.

What about our obligation toward future generations? Some would argue that we need not take heed of possible consequences of our actions because certainly whatever potential damage might occur can be righted by subsequent generations through an appropriate "technological fix". While the technological fix has often been applied in the face of unintended consequences, the "fix" is often accompanied by new unintended consequences. To return to the automobile example, covering more of our landscape with more roads, superhighways and parking lots to accommodate them create all the attendant problems that are the constant companions of the machine's enormous success. Today's generation experiences the effects of previous generations’ indifference to potential problems associated with many of today's common technological innovations.

Another area of our responsibility comes from what I choose to call secular immortality, how we must behave. Whatever may be our view of immortality from our personal religious (or non-religious) orientation, there is one universal inescapable fact. We spend our entire lives interacting consciously or subconsciously with one another. This interaction has a direct bearing on our obligation to each other, and to posterity. Think of it this way. While the memory process includes a certain amount of forgetting lest our storage capacity becomes saturated, an enormous fraction of the encounters between humans remains stored in the form of a chemical change in our brain. A kind act given or received, a smile, an insult, a casual encounter with nothing more than eye contact, honest praise, a humorous event, a tragic one, a lesson, an act of nurturing, and so on–nearly every encounter results in a permanent change in both parties, the giver and the receiver. Sometimes it is only seeing the image of someone, someone perhaps from whom we have learned something useful, or amusing, or insightful becomes part of our brain’s memory bank. As time goes on we collect myriad of encounters with persons known or unknown, some far away, some close by, some long dead, even some whom we have never met at all. We are steadily storing remembrances in our heads, and each stored remembrance alters us permanently.

We too, by the same process, are constantly having our own encounters stored as changes in the brains of others. Of course, one cannot tell how each change we create or experience will affect our further behavior, but surely as we go about our day-to-day activities we are steadily building a kind of immortality in the form of all the images of encounters with our fellow humans. We constantly are being permanently altered and we are permanently altering others. So as we progress through life, each minute of each day is a progression of changes within ourselves, some trivial, some highly significant. We are constantly undergoing alteration. That influence spreads from us to every subsequent encounter and on into the following generations. Think, what an awesome responsibility we humans bear as we live our lives, the responsibility to make every encounter a positive one–or at the very least, neutral. There is no escape from those chemical memories. Its effect never entirely vanishes. So regardless of what moral or ethical position we choose, we should conduct ourselves in a fashion that maximizes the quality of the sum of all our interactions that lives on outside of us forever, the quality of our secular immortality.

• How might new technologies of the next five decades affect you?
• Can an individual influence the course of technological change?
• What do you want technological change to do for you?
• What obligations do we have to help narrow the gap between the impoverished and the well off everywhere?
• What are our obligations to posterity?
• Are there moral/ethical consequences to all technological change?
• What aspects of our civilization are worth preserving?
• Can we always distinguish among the possible, the necessary and the desirable?
• Would robots that can think and act independently be desirable?
• Is "small" really beautiful when it comes to technology?
• How do we deal with terrorism, racism, and ethnic conflict?
• How do we define our responsibilities to each other and to the world?
• How is "wealth" created?