6 Grand Technological Challenges for 2011 and Beyond

While different futurist-technologist teams and projects are focused on a wide range of topics, 6 grand challenges are more remarkable as they will impact at least one billion people’s lives over the next decade.

Where Are We Going?

According to a recent consensus at a future-oriented university, the most challenging areas of research and work especially for the futurist technologists may be categorized as: Energy, Poverty, Global Health, Education, Security, and Space. The technologists are busy with finding proper responses for mentioned challenges as we’ve just started the first year of second decade in the new millennium. What are the questions and what are they going to put on the table?

1. Energy: How can exponential technologies be used to provide humanity with low-cost and abundant energy to meet their needs for prosperity?

2. Poverty: How can exponential technologies be leveraged to create new jobs and wealth to alleviate poverty?

3. Global Health: How can technology be used to provide billions with low-cost, ubiquitous healthcare, and help to identify and prevent pandemics?

4. Education: How can technology be used to provide personalized education to the world’s developing areas?

5. Security: How can exponential technology be used to address global issues around wars, terrorism, crime, genocide, and corruption?

6. Space: How can the vast and abundant energy and material resources of space be used to address humanity's grand challenges?

How these questions can be addressed? Good question. The top method is simply to stay keenly attuned to trends in technology laboratories and research centers around the world, taking note of even things that seem impractical or useless. You then ask yourself: “What if they found a way to do that thing ten thousand times as quickly/powerfully/well? What if someone weaponized it? Monopolized it? Or commercialized it, enabling millions of people to do this new thing, routinely? What would society look like, if everybody took this new thing for granted?”

We have the challenges in one hand, and their related technological questions in the other hand. Whatever your personal answers may be (and I fully respect them), the reality is that we can never underestimate the great power of global change. These challenges are not going to be fixed. They usually appear as the most important challenges we may ever face within the next decade, but we may face with new challenges with more priorities in the future. At least, it seems that these areas are among the most pressing of today's grand challenges.

As a futurist you may work on your personal responses for these questions, but the challenges are enough big not to be solved by just an individual’s point of view. No one can play the role of Superman in this matter and they should be discussed through a collective wisdom and treated accordingly by a global determination, not just by a bunch of selected organizations or countries’ will. I think that these challenges can make up a good pool of ideas for the next issues of the Futurist magazine in the coming months. Anyway, think about them and share your ideas with me or the Futurist’ editors.

Where Should We Go?

Living in a changing world makes it always necessary to review our past priorities in all levels and make sure that we’ve made necessary alignments to live in a more calibrated world. The futurist technologists are just a group of experts among the world's ocean of researchers and thinkers who are going to be ready to develop future-focused and innovative solutions required to effectively address mentioned challenges. As the technologists deal with different aspects of implementing technology for today and tomorrow problems, others especially the philosophers are busy with finding new approaches to control these challenges and solve their related problems in more wisely ways. Most of the times, they think that technology-related problems cannot be solved by the same technology which has caused so many troubles.

Energy, Global Health, Security and Space are those areas which are affected directly by the consequences of using the technology in uncontrolled ways. In the past (not so long ago), we had cleaner cities, lower levels of consuming different sources of energy, and more security. Believe it or not, a great number of our today’s challenges and problems are caused just by using the technology in an uncontrollable manner. Now, don't misunderstand me here, when I ask this: How can we remove them by the same technology? There is no doubt about the merits of technology. I’m not against the wise usage of technology, but I think it’s time to rethink the ways in which we have been using technologies. It’s so good to make new exponential technologies capable of facing with mentioned above challenges, but shouldn’t we make a new balance between our simple natural lives and our technology-intensified civilization?

In my point of view, life is so much bigger compared to our small hand-made technologies. We have to keep our minds open to new ideas and see things on a different perspective now. In this way, I think we’ll be able to bring our technology-squeezed world back to life again. I’ve realized everything is up to us whether we want to live with these challenges, or we are strong enough to get up and become new wise futurist technologists.