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Mike Treder
Center for
Responsible Nanotechnology Advanced nanotechnology offers unprecedented opportunities for progress—defeating poverty, starvation, and disease, opening up outer space, expanding human capacities, and even lengthening our life spans. But it also brings unprecedented risks—environmental and health dangers, massive job displacement causing economic and social disruption, threats to civil liberties from ubiquitous surveillance, all the way to the specter of a new arms race and devastating wars fought with far more powerful weapons of mass destruction. The challenge of achieving the goals and managing the risks of nanotechnology requires more than just brilliant molecular engineering. In addition to scientific and technical ingenuity, other disciplines and talents will be vitally important. No single approach will solve all problems or address all needs. The only answer is a collective answer, and that will demand an unprecedented collaboration—a network of leaders in business, government, academia, and NGOs. It will require participation from people of many nations, cultures, languages, and belief systems. Never before have we faced such a tremendous opportunity—and never before have the risks been so great. Our task now is to begin building bridges that will lead to safety and progress for the entire world; bridges that will develop common understanding, create lines of communication, and create a stable structure that will enable humankind to pass safely through the transition into the nano era.
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Presented at the International Congress
of Nanotechnology, November 7-10, 2004 San Francisco, USA
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