Conclusion

The fundamental fact about scientific consilience and technological convergence is uncertainty. Perhaps science and engineering are undergoing a major phase change, after which everything will be different. Perhaps political opposition will prevent unification, at least for a long time, allowing non-technical factors considerable scope to shape human destiny. However, one way to describe today’s world is to say that old technologies are consuming natural resources and polluting the environment at an accelerating rate, while terrorists seek weapons of mass destruction and imperialists develop privacy-destroying information systems. From that perspective, it will be necessary to achieve convergence quickly, unifying humanity as well as science and technology before they destroy each other.

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