Future Technologies Advisory Group
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The Sigma Scan: a database of future issues and trends
The Sigma Scan is a collection of future issues and trends developed by the Outsights-Ipsos MORI partnership, commissioned by the UK Government's Horizon Scanning Centre at the DTI Office of Science and Innovation. The database containis a number of trends, emerging issues and developments which may influence the course of events over the next 50 years and thereby shape the future of the UK and the world at large. The basic unit of the Sigma Scan is the Issue Paper. Each of these 146 Issue Papers provides a brief description of a particular trend or development and a projection of how, given a range of possible conditions, it may unfold in the future. The topic areas represented in the Scan are diverse, spanning the classic futures PESTE categories: Politics, Economics, Society, Science/Technology and the Environment.
An example that has made the headlines is the Issue Paper on " Robo-rights: Utopian dream or rise of the machines?", covered as " Robots could demand legal rights" by BBC News and flamed by Wesley J. Smith as " Transhumanism on the March". Two Issue Papers that mention transhumanism are " The Extended Self: better than well": "Technological development has tended to focus on altering and improving our external physical environment. However, over the next 50 years, the opportunities to focus innovation inwardly and remake our minds and bodies in fundamental ways look likely to increase. These opportunities will arise from advances in biotechnology, neuroscience, information technology, and robotics - and the synergisms between them. The potential to extend the mental and physical hand that nature has dealt us has developed into a more extreme view of the future: "transhumanism," the idea that our descendants could be quite different from us, even, to an extent, by 2050", and "Technology for the Body and Mind ": "The formidable forces of computation, genetics, molecular biology, imaging and nanotechnology look likely to combine to transform our understanding of the body and brain. The increasingly profound understanding of the human genome, for example, could open up multiple new ways of both repairing and enhancing the body". This is especially interesting in view of the mainstream nature of this database commissioned by the UK Government.
12/22/2006 Permalink/comments
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