It is advisable to evaluate the likelihood of highly meaningful coming events.

The key problems of society today are rarely categorized by governments as problems of science and technology. They are assumed to be socioeconomic and political problems, such as avoiding war, building the economy, curbing terrorism, fighting poverty and disease, or preserving a healthful environment. We can predict, however, that it will become clear that all social-economic-political issues intersect and that issues of technological advance are right in the middle of every intersection, sometimes causing the problems, more often offering possibilities for their solutions, and frequently providing opportunities for the world society to rise to new, higher levels of productivity, satisfaction, and happiness. Of course, trying to predict the future with perfection is not defensible. But if we are active in some field, we are bound to be aware of important trends in it, and we should take our anticipations of significant future events seriously. We should force ourselves to list potential developments regularly, estimating for each the probability of its occurrence and the importance of the event should it occur. Then, for those happenings we consider both highly probable and significant, we should ask ourselves what we can do early to enhance the positive and suppress the negative consequences. At present we see that the impact of advancing technology on the social-economic-political framework of the entire globe is growing rapidly, yet its implications are far from being adequately explored. Moreover, the effects of technological change are underestimated as short-range; crisis-dominated problems monopolize the attention of most of the world’s leaders. A severe mismatch is developing between accelerating technological advance and lagging social progress.