Brands: forget the promise of a semi-religious experience, recognise the contribution made by price vs performance. Cities: mass-manufacture great homes to house the millions still coming off the countryside of China and elsewhere. Design: stop the narcissism, focus on reliability and durability. Energy: dispel irrational fears of the nuclear sort. Avoid finger-wagging microgeneration of energy in the home, go for large-scale tidal power. IT: make government projects successful, but not intrusive. Move to ubiquitous, speaker-independent voice operation, always-on videoconferencing, and sensors of the physical world. Mobile IT: make productive use of the face, RFID tags, vertical market applications. Play: keep it out of work and moderate its influence in schools. Don’t use it as an instrument to reach other goals. Work: rekindle Western interest in the idea, by making the activity of work intrinsically more exciting.
Possible solutions – clarify, visually represent and widely display:
- Real v perceived risks
- Relative v absolute risks
- How progress throws up new problems – which mankind tends to solve.
Issues for society to address:
- Forecasting
Rehabilitating a sense of collective agency. The future is indeed what we make it – provided that the political will and the economic investment are fought for.
- Innovation
The need for basic, long-term research and unpredictable experiment.
- Universities
Generating new knowledge, not just transferring existing best practice.
James Woudhuysen is coauthor of Why Is Construction So Backward? (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA))
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