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I think all scientists should, following his example, divert some of their efforts
towards public policy -- and engage with government, business, and NGOs
We need a focus on projects that are long-term in political perspectives, even if a
mere instant in the history of our planet. And that’s something that universities can do -
— not least because they’re full of young people who will live to the end of the century.
We should use their expertise to address the extreme ‘low probability/high
consequence’ threats that I’ve mentioned -- to assess which can be dismissed firmly
as science fiction, and to consider how to enhance resilience against the more credible
ones.
But though we live under the shadow of these threats, and may be political
pessimists, we must remain techno-optimists. Advances in AI, biotech, nanotech and
space can boost the developing as well as the developed world. Indeed if we don’t
responsibly progress these new technologies we won’t achieve a bright vision.
Undiluted application of the ‘precautionary principle’ has a manifest downside.
We're all on this crowded world together. “Space-ship Earth” is hurtling through
the void. Its passengers are anxious and fractious. Their life-support system is
vulnerable to disruption and break-downs. But there is too little planning too little
horizon-scanning, too little awareness of long-term risks.
A wise mantra is that ‘the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable’.
I want to conclude with some words from two scientific sages.
First, HG Wells.
Back in 1902. Wells was already alert to the risk of global disaster:
"It is impossible to show why certain things should not utterly destroy and end the
human. story .. and make all our efforts vain .... something from space, or pestilence,
or some great disease of the atmosphere, some trailing cometary poison, some great
emanation of vapour from the interior of the Earth, or new animals to prey on us, or
some drug or wrecking madness in the mind of man".
But nonetheless he retained a vision. "Humanity", he proclaimed, “has come some
way, and the distance we have travelled gives us some earnest of the way we have to
go. All the past is but the beginning of a beginning; all that the human mind has
accomplished is but the dream before the awakening."
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