when curves of R&D converge

[Doug Millison]

"If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come
-- you heard it here first -- when the curves of research and development in
artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge."
-Thomas Pynchon

see also:

_The Global Technology Revolution: Bio/Nano/Materials Trends and
Their Synergies with Information Technology by 2015_
http://www.odci.gov/nic/nic_publications/2015_files/rand.htm
.pdf version [87 pages] http://www.odci.gov/nic/graphics/rand.pdf

...and especially the charts, discussion, and conclusions re converging
technology trends at
http://www.odci.gov/nic/nic_publications/2015_files/rand/mr1307.ch3.html


These revolutionary effects are not proceeding without issue. Various
ethical, economic, legal, environmental, safety, and other social concerns
and decisions must be addressed as the world's population comes to grip with
the potential effect of these trends on their cultures and their lives. The
most significant issues may be privacy, economic disparity, cultural threats
(and reactions), and bioethics. In particular, issues such as eugenics,
human cloning, and genetic modification invoke the strongest ethical and
moral reactions. Understanding these issues is quite complex, since they
both drive technology directions and influence each other in secondary and
higher-order ways. Citizens and decisionmakers need to inform themselves
about technology, assembling and analyzing these complex interactions to
truly understand the debates surrounding technology. Such steps will prevent
naive decisions, maximize technology's benefit given personal values, and
identify inflection points at which decisions can have the desired effect
without being negated by an unanalyzed issue."

for balance, see The Onion story about technology breakthroughs that
somebody posted yesterday...