Downloadable MS Word format:

Arabic downloadable MsWord version (if a dialog box asks for your authentification - user name and password- just give "Cancel")

English downloadable MsWord version (if a dialog box asks for your authentification - user name and password- just give "Cancel")

Russian downloadable MsWord version (if a dialog box asks for your authentification - user name and password- just give "Cancel")

Slovak downloadable MsWord version (if a dialog box asks for your authentification - user name and password- just give "Cancel")

The Questionnaire

    Section 1: Themes to include in scenarios depicting the future course of the management of S&T in the next 20-25 years

    Section 2: Scenarios
        Scenario 1. S&T Develops a Mind of Its Own
        Scenario 2. The World Wakes Up
        Scenario 3. Please Turn off the Spigot
        Scenario 4. Backlash

On behalf of the Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University, we have the honor to invite you to participate in a two-round questionnaire to assess future science and technology policy and management issues. You have been selected by your country's Science Attaché to Washington, D.C. or by the Millennium Project and its representatives Nodes around the world.

The attached questionnaire and the second round to follow in two months will be used to produce long-range alternative scenarios on science and technology. This completes a three-year assessment. The first year explored S&T issues over the next 25 years. The second year explored the implications of these issues for S&T management. And this, the third year, is intended to make the policy and management alternatives explicit via scenarios.

The Millennium Project is a worldwide effort to collect and synthesize judgments about emerging global challenges that may affect the human condition. Its annual State of the Future and other special reports are used by government policymakers, corporate and NGO decision-makers, and educators to add focus to important issues, clarify choices, and improve the quality of decisions. The Project is funded by  sponsors  with additional funding for this particular study from the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy.

Results of this research are expected to be of interest and value to the national and international scientific communities and the institutions that fund such research, providing the context for setting long-term goals and strategies. Those who respond to this questionnaire will receive the study's results in a complimentary copy of the 2003 State of the Future. No attributions will be made, but respondents will be listed as participants.

Please contact us with any questions and return your responses to arrive at the Millennium Project by 7 February 2003. You will receive the second round questionnaire in about two months, which will be based on the responses to the enclosed questionnaire. Please respond by e-mail to acunu@igc.org with a copy to jglenn@igc.org and Tedjgordon@att.net, or fax to +1-202-686-5179, or airmail to: The Millennium Project, , 4421 Garrison St. NW, Washington, DC 20016 USA.

We look forward to including your views.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome C. Glenn, Director, Millennium Project
Theodore Gordon, Senior Fellow, Millennium Project

This questionnaire has two sections. Section 1 asks for your judgments about themes that are important to include in writing alternative scenarios about international science and technology (S&T) with different assumptions about management and policy. Section 2 presents four scenario sketches for your consideration.

You do not have to answer all the questions in Sections 1 and 2, just those related to your interest and expertise. Although no attributions will be made, participants will be listed in the final report.

Section 1: What are the most important themes to include in scenarios depicting the future course of the management of science and technology in the next 20-25 years? An initial list is provided below. Please indicate how important you consider each of them, using the following scale. Also, please suggest additional themes that you think are important.

Importance Scale
5 = This theme must be addressed in a set of scenarios of the future of S&T management
4 = This theme ought to be included
3 = Might be included
2 = Could be helpful
1 = Misleading, should be avoided
 

Themes	Importance
The rate of progress of S&T (from very high to stagnant)
The severity of the risks of S&T (from very high to very low)
The degree to which the risks of S&T materialize (from soon to never)
The locus of regulation (from globally centralized to geographically diffuse)
The nature of S&T regulation (from constraining to loose)
The degree to which regulations can be circumvented (from hard to easy)
The penalties associated with violation of regulations (from harsh to low)
The level of public concern over the risks (from high to low)
The responses and attitudes of media (from friendly to antagonistic)
The effect of regulation on globalization of science (from constraining to low)
The nature of science education for the general public (from well informed to none)
The emergence of spokespersons and "stars" for science (from high to low)
Additional Suggestions:

 

Section 2: Please read the following four scenarios sketches based on prior Millennium Project work and share your views on at least one of them. Note that the questions that follow each scenario ask for judgments about plausibility as distinguished from probability or desirability.

Scenario 1. S&T Develops a Mind of Its Own

By 2025 the number, linkage, and longevity of educated humans increased dramatically. Human intelligence had been augmented by a vast variety of computer-mind interfaces. As intelligence increased, science and technology (S&T) accelerated, which in turn further accelerated collective intelligence.

As a result, the rate of scientific discoveries and technological applications became so fast that by the time government regulations were put into place, the science and technological capacities had moved far beyond the conditions that called for the original regulations. Additionally, S&T activities outlawed in one country quickly moved to others. Globalization and advanced cyberspace made it simple to bypass rules by constantly redistributing activities around the world.

Meanwhile, the International Science and Technology Organization (ISTO) had evolved over the years into a body that has a unique influence on S&T developments. The organization was originally designed as an information switchboard to make it easier for anyone to access the world's S&T knowledge along with conjecture about future S&T threats and opportunities. As a result, unexpected as it was, scientists and engineers became less likely to pursue dangerous activities since the bright light of publicity and information made it apparent who was pursuing science for the betterment of the human condition in a rational way, and who was flouting the rules. This exposure influenced funding, university hiring, collegial cooperation, and publication within the world S&T community.

Although ISTO started as an information system, governments began to rely on it so heavily that it became an informal regulatory and priority-setting agency by default. Yet, it remains to be seen if it can continue to be so, as S&T dramatically accelerates even further in the coming years, developing what may become a "mind of its own." For example, some potential disasters were successfully avoided by early warning software that had been integrated into various products and processes. In addition to providing early warning, this intelligent technology managed self-diagnostic and repair systems, and also prompted governments and international organizations to act on their responsibilities. Which brought up the question of who is really in charge? Human or technology?

It also brings up the question of who is in charge of the directions in which science evolve and to what end technology is applied. Such questions are raised in university courses on S&T ethics now required for science and engineering students. Students also have to learn codes of conduct and sign the Scientist's Oath. This interest in ethics has resulted the growth of S&T special interest groups linked with intelligent software that create standards and attempt to monitor the S&T enterprise, as part of ISTO's effort to manage scientific risk.

The convergence and synergies of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, computational intelligence, and cognitive sciences improved the human condition for the majority of the world by 2025. These S&T synergies plus global marketing systems made it possible for entrepreneurs and innovators to have an idea in the morning, complete R&D by lunch, assemble marketing systems an hour later, and sell enough to enjoy a profit that evening. Individuals cross political and corporate boundaries in pico-seconds forming new alliances unknown to traditional power structures. Even remote villages in the poorest countries have cyberspace access for tele-education, tele-work, tele-medicine, tele-commerce, and tele-nearly-anything. As a result, people became more habituated than hostile to such advances. The world appears to be moving from political hierarchies to knowledge ecologies that some speculate may be evolving beyond human control.

Questions:

1.1 What would make this scenario more plausible?
 
 

1.2 Are dramatic increases in collective human-machine intelligence plausible within 25 years? Yes [ ] No [ ] Why?
 
 
 

1.3 Assuming this acceleration is not sustainable forever, what could change it?
 
 
 

1.4 Is it likely that organizations designed to regulate the course of S&T will generally fail to keep pace with accelerated advances of S&T within 25 years? Yes [ ] No [ ] Why?
 
 
 

Scenario 2. The World Wakes Up

The murder of 25 million people in the mid-2010s by the self-proclaimed Agent of God who created the genetically modified Congo virus, finally woke up the world to the realization that an individual acting alone could create and use a weapon of mass destruction. This phenomenon became known as SIMAD (single individual massively destructive).

It was argued that without serious international and governmental controls similar catastrophes were inevitable. A series of meetings of eminent persons was held to decide how to better control science and technology and limit access to developments that could be applied to SIMAD. The participants were selected through the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues, the International Council of Scientific Unions, S&T interest groups, Nobel laureates, and private sector R&D firms working in the areas of potential catastrophic risks. The meetings created definitions, guidelines, intervention criteria, drafts for international treaties, and the charter for the International Science and Technology Organization (ISTO). Each time the eminent group reached a consensus on some element of the strategy, it was discussed around the world and created a broader social consensus, which led to treaties and establishing the regulatory power of ISTO in concert with the UN Security Council.

Since then the Security Council has authorized intervention to terminate lines of scientific inquiry on three occasions, but each time, the research lab in question decided to come into ISTO compliance prior to the need for international enforcement. Although the speed of S&T may have slowed due to the increased regulation of everything from genetically modified organisms to nanotechnology, progress was still so fast that the media are always full of amazing innovations in medicine, transportation, and education that have vastly improved the general human welfare over the past 25 years. Some argue that the global registry of S&T research and its forecasting and assessment sections in ISTO actually improved many prioritization processes, which ultimately benefited more people for less money.

Technical means of monitoring, detecting, and neutralizing threats and identifying opportunities was half of the solution. The other half was the combination of the massive and highly funded efforts that greatly improved the education of people for a more responsible and tolerant world by 2025. New applications of advanced cognitive science, nano-transceivers for personalized global access to all education materials, thousands of interlinked educational cyber-games, customized nutritional supplements, and the global ethics dialogues helped to create a world in 2025 in which most people had the equivalent of at least a secondary education and increased tolerance for diversity. Although connecting the education systems with the security systems is disturbing to some people, in fact, individual acts of mass destruction thus far have been prevented.

Questions:

2.1 What would make this scenario more plausible?
 
 
 

2.2 Is it plausible that weapons of mass destruction will be available to single individuals within 25 years? Yes [ ] No [ ] Why
 
 
 

2.3 Is it plausible that advances in cognitive science, information technology, and new educational systems and/or changes in older ones will be able to significantly improve tolerance for diversity within 25 years? Yes [ ] No [ ] Why?
 
 

2.4 Is it plausible that international S&T treaties and regulations will have provisions for enforcement police enforcement or military intervention within 25 years? Yes [ ] No [ ] Why?
 
 

Scenario 3. Please Turn off the Spigot

TIME Magazine, December 31, 2025
Annual Person of the Year Issue

This year, TIME has selected the Brazilian, Jacobo Minskov, the anti-science hero as person of the year. He must be credited with stimulating the world's growing distaste for the "cathedral of science." He argues that science and religion are parallel, but with different epistemologies: both seek reasons for being, both have Popes, confessors and professors, both try to influence values and education. True or false, religion gives hope and absolution, but science, he says, gives only an appetite for more science. He attacks the enterprise of science with "its pompous and snobbish isolation, separate language, private club-like rules of admission, unwritten codes of behavior and self-aggrandizement." He attacks it, as he said in his Humanitarian Award acceptance speech, because it "encourages excesses in consumption, raises false hopes in the sick and particularly the poor, diverts sparse funding from more important social ends, locks the world into a neo-colonialism that is based on consumption." And worst of all, with what science calls progress comes the downside of unexpected consequences that, for the first time in history, can destroy us all. While Minskov is sometimes disparaged as a modern Luddite, his eloquent and persuasive arguments have resonated around the world to form the basis for "the remains of science".

Born in São Paulo in 1987, he had a scientific education at the Brasilia Bio-Physics Institute where he learned modern genetics and bio-technology, and, as he says, that "good science is amoral." After his post-doctorial work at Yale, he began a promising career by developing a strain of super-wheat through bio-manipulation. But to his horror, he saw that his published research resulted in a terrorist version of the wheat- a form that had a "back door" through which terrorists could hold a crop ransom. This was the basis for the now famous "bread plots" of 2013 that resulted in massive, unnecessary starvations, mandated destruction of the super-strain and ultimately capture of the terrorists after they had received one billion -not yet recovered- dollars. He certainly hadn't intended that when he published his work, but it had happened anyway.

It was true all around him -- accidentally or intentionally released genetically modified organisms had damaged the biosphere, biotechnology was being used to build new kinds of weapons of mass destruction, biodiversity suffered from aggressive marketing of genetically altered, patented varieties. He saw this in other fields as well. Science was "hot"- one discovery led to another and discoveries synergized to form whole new areas of research overnight. But new scientific discoveries were being distorted from their original intent deliberately or through inadvertence, and these "slip-ups" provided, in the end, new means for killing large numbers of people, capturing or controlling their behavior, and forming or distorting their ideas. The early promises of disease cures were real and well intentioned but in the end, the overly optimistic projections were often just a means for increasing funding or explaining the high price of drugs and new products.

He was troubled. When he visited his home in São Paulo and was asked by his old teachers, "Well, Jacobo, how is what you are doing going to make poverty and disease disappear?" He had no acceptable answer.

Recognizing that there was a latent distrust of science in the real world, and that there were a handful of like-minded scientists around the world, he turned to the Internet, and took to the streets and to the corridors of power. He said, in effect, enough is enough and as a result of his early political work, the International Commission of the Science Review was formed in 2019. This Commission was designed to review controversial research proposals, establish risk limits, and indict scientists that stepped over the bounds established by the commission.

But the Commission was flawed. Politics stood in the way of true risk assessment. Funding was king; enough funding could buy a lot of risk. Also, penalties handed down to individual scientists were almost a mark of honor.

A lesser person might have given up. But after a three-year period of quiet frustration, Minskov took up the cause again and in the past year (for which he is being honored here) exposed the corruption of the Commission he had helped establish. He made famous the saying, "Everywhere the air stinks from corruption. The management of science has failed, give us management of science."

This year, one scandal in particular captured the public's attention. Brazil Institute of Security (BIS) uncovered a sophisticated covert laboratory at a prominent Brazilian university engaged in the development of an unidentified but apparently lethal airborne toxin, a super anthrax. The laboratory directors held that the research was legitimate but when asked by the BIS to produce information about the sponsors of the work, they could only point to a shell pharmaceutical corporation known to BIS to be affiliated with terrorist causes. They said they were ignorant of the terrorist ties. " Naiveté is no excuse," said the BIS. Minskov and others called for prosecution of the directors of the university laboratory and researchers, charging them with aiding in the development of weapons of mass destruction. The case is yet unresolved.

Questions:

3.1 What would make this scenario more plausible?
 
 
 

3.2 Can S&T regulators and commissions be virtually free from corruption? Yes [ ] No [ ] If yes, then how?
 
 
 

3.3 Is it plausible that an anti-science movement will be as or more powerful than the environmental movement? Yes [ ] No [ ] Why?
 
 
 

3.4 Is it plausible that international systems (like the International Atomic Energy Agency - IAEA) will be established to monitor and regulate biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other areas of scientific research and development with enforcement powers? Yes [ ] No [ ] Why?
 
 

Scenario 4. Backlash

The best science is free science
Pro science is con-science
Science directed is science enslaved
Science is your friend: it makes the future

These are some of the slogans on the signs that scientists carried in protest at the Jakarta World Summit on Science and Technology in 2020. The principal topic of discussion was the need for instituting some sorts of world control over the directions of science and technology. Supporters of the establishment of an S&T management system argued that the scale of intended and unintended impacts of S&T necessitated global systems and since the impacts could be worldwide, global systems were justified. The opposition argued that regulations designed to reduce the threats of science gone awry would simply drive research underground or to other countries with less concern about enforcing global regulation. There was even some rumbling among the opposition group of a global strike of scientists but lack of a science-labor organization made this virtually impossible. (We understand that there are now some efforts underway to organize scientists into the first truly global labor organization).

The arguments of those sign-carrying scientists were effective and the Jakarta meeting ended with a highly polished statement signed by 187 nations recognizing the autonomy of science and charging the disciplines themselves with the responsibility of determining the "line in the sand" that defined acceptable risks in their fields. It also charged them with defining the rules of ethical behavior and the disciplinary action that would be imposed on scientists that crossed the bounds of acceptable behavior.

In one sense it worked but it failed in another. Science blossomed. One discovery after another made the news. Genetic medicines widely used. Diseases cured, or at least controlled. Tele-medicine and automatic assistants. New nano and giga scale technology. It was truly the golden age of science, accelerated by liberal funding, the need of industry for new products, synergy among disciplines, and the ever-adoring media.

But the Jakarta approach had its dark side. The golden age of science proved to be a mixture of good, bad, and illusion. Some of the most valued discoveries and new capabilities cost security and privacy, and produced a kind of imposed rationality that was antithetical to many cultures. Not least, terrorists took advantage of some of the technologies to kill, threaten and extort.

The media soon took up the dark side and the level of public concern rose and became vocal. The media, once the friend of science, attacked it. The response? Mobs formed in front of university and government research labs, and the slogans on their signs of protest read:

Kill science before it kills us
Science is Inhuman

At a high energy particle accelerator, a scientist has proposed an experiment that has an extremely low probability of creating a mini black hole. If this were the result of the experiment, the solar system including the earth, and its life might be extinguished. The laboratory argues that the experiment should proceed because the chances of creating a black hole are very slight and the data to be gained will fundamentally improve our knowledge of the first 30 microseconds after the big bang. The public protests loudly.

Questions:

4.1 What would make this scenario more plausible?
 
 
 

4.2 When extreme unintended consequences are involved, can a cost-benefit trade-off be logically made? Yes [ ] No [ ] Why?
 
 
 

4.3 Within the next 25 years, might scientists in the future unite into a global labor organization? Yes [ ] No [ ] Why?
 
 
 

4.4 Can science disciplines effectively self-regulate? Yes [ ] No [ ] Why?
 
 
 

Please provide additional comments on any of the four scenarios (Please indicate the number of the scenario with your comments.)
 
 

Your Name: Title:

Organization:

Address:
 

E-Mail:

Are you a futurist___ natural scientist___ social scientist___ computational Scientist___ engineer__

R&D manager___ policymaker___ consultant___ other ____________

Do you work for an International Organization ___ Government___ Corporation___ NGO___ University___ Other ___________
 

Please respond by e-mail to acunu@igc.org with a copy to jglenn@igc.org and tedjgordon@att.com, or fax to +1-202-686-5179, or airmail to: The Millennium Project, , 4421 Garrison St. NW, Washington, DC 20016 USA to arrive by 7 February 2003.

Thank you for your participation. You will receive the results in a couple of months.