Complexité des systèmes...

"Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species."

http://complexityandpolitics.csregistry.org/

A Conference organized by

Collegium International and Complex Systems Society

ISC PIF, Paris, 28-29 September 2007

Argument
With the advent of the atomic bomb humankind became potentially the maker of its own demise. In a recent stunning book, England's Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, who occupies Newton's chair at Cambridge University, forecasts that the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that humankind will survive to the end of the twenty-first century. The title of the book is explicit, and the subtitle even more: Our Final Hour. A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in this Century – on Earth and Beyond . Sir Martin warns us: "Our increasingly interconnected world is vulnerable to new risks, 'bio' or 'cyber', terror or error. The dangers from twenty-first century technology could be graver and more intractable than the threat of nuclear devastation that we faced for decades. And human-induced pressures on the global environment may engender higher risks than the age-old hazards of earthquakes, eruptions and asteroid impacts." Sir Martin is by no means isolated in his warning. Already in 2000, Bill Joy, one of the most brilliant American computer scientists, wrote a celebrated and much commented upon paper titled "Why the future doesn't need us. Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species."

Even if one is less pessimistic than those two major scientists, it remains that our way of life seems in the long run to be irremediably doomed. One would be hard-pressed to imagine how it could last more than another half-century.

Thus we find ourselves with our backs to the wall. We need to say what is more important to us: our ethical imperative of equality, which leads to principles of universalization, or else our mode of development. Either the privileged part of the planet isolates itself, which increasingly means that it protects itself with shields of all sorts against the aggressions which the resentment of those left behind will render ever crueler and more abominable; or else another type of relationship to the world, to nature, to things and beings, must be invented, one capable of being universalized on a humanity-wide scale.

Science and Technology will have to play a crucial role in this radical shift provided that they entertain with Society the kind of dialogue of which they have proven incapable so far, for reasons that need to be analyzed. It is the task of Politics to organize this dialogue, in a way that is neither subservient to nor ignorant of scientific and technological promises and threats.

Complexity is the major notion here, for it is at the same time the source of our major problems and the key to their solution. We have become capable of tampering with, and triggering off, complex phenomena in nature as well as in society. As a consequence we have to confront a new kind of uncertainty or, rather, indeterminacy. Anticipating the consequences of our choices is at the same time more important and more difficult than ever. What is desperately required is a novel science of the future. As cybernetician Ross Ashby once said, our thinking must be at least as complex as the systems it interacts with.

Methodology and Organization

The conference will start with the exploration of 4 case studies that best illustrate the challenges that complexity poses to politics.

•Climate change, the insufficiencies of the Precautionary principle, and the need for an international coordination.
•The promises and threats of the rapid development of advanced technologies and their convergence (nano, bio, info, cogno).
•The new forms of geopolitical violence, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
•The resilience and fragility of the new forms of industrial and financial capitalism, and the new forms of inequality, poverty, and injustice they bring about.

Those explorations will take the form of 4 round tables combining experts of each domain and theoreticians of complex systems.

Then will come a session devoted to drawing and synthetizing the lessons of the case studies at both a theoretical and political level. Such notions as collective intelligence, ethics of the future, preemption versus deterrence, education to complexity, and the like will be questioned and discussed.

The deliverable of the conference might be a Manifesto taking the form of a White Book.

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http://complexityandpolitics.csregistry.org/tiki-index.php?page=full_text

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collegium_international_éthique,_politique_et_scientifique