the_futures-lab

News From The Future Thursday, August 23, 2007
New Disease
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From The Guardian:
A new killer disease on par with HIV-Aids or ebola is likely to emerge in the next few years and threaten the lives of millions of people worldwide, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said today.

Potentially deadly new diseases are being identified at an "unprecedented rate", with global epidemics spreading more rapidly than ever, the United Nations agency warned in its annual world health report.

At least one new disease has been identified every year since the 1970s. Today, there are 39 that were unknown just over a generation ago....

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Unintended Consequences of Biofuels
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Biofuels, particluarly those derived from ethanol, have been heralded as an ideal way to wean us off of polluting and increasingly expensive fossil fuels. While we may have no choice but to rely on biofuels in the future, some futurists are sounding the alarm about the unintended consequences of biofuel reliance. In July, the futurist think tank Global Business Network noted that crop growth for biofuels could come at the expense of the world food supply. Others are citing the phenomenon of "agflation," or the increased price of all things agricultural, from produce to dairy products to real estate in rural areas. Indeed, manufacturers of all types are beginning to notice higher prices for animal by-products used in products such as soaps.

While market forces may eventually correct agflation-driven price increases, the time is now to understand that energy solutions such as biofuel are not "magic bullets" without impact in other areas, and to mitigate those impacts.

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Nanotechnology and visions of the future (part 1)
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Earlier this year I was asked to write an article explaining nanotechnology and the debates surrounding it for a non-scientific audience with interests in social and policy issues. This article was published in the Summer 2007 issue of the journal Soundings. Here is the unedited version, in installments. Regular readers of the blog will be familiar with most of the arguments already, but I hope they will find it interesting to see it all in one place.
Introduction
Few new technologies have been accompanied by such expansive promises of their potential to change the world as nanotechnology. For some, it will lead to a utopia, in which material want has been abolished and disease is a thing of the past, while others see apocalypse and even the extinction of the human race. Governments and multinationals round the world see nanotechnology as an engine of economic growth, while campaigning groups foresee environmental degradation and a widening of the gap between the rich and poor. But at the heart of these arguments lies a striking lack of consensus about what the technology is or will be, what it will make possible and what its dangers might be. Technologies don’t exist or develop in a vacuum, and nanotechnology is no exception; arguments about the likely, or indeed desirable, trajectory of the technology are as much about their protagonists’ broader aspirations for society as about nanotechnology itself.

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