Abstract
According to some technology enthusiasts our technological developments appear to be accelerating at an exponential rate. A common vision of such enthusiasts is that the accelerating pace of science and technology development will enable us to transform the world in more profound and significant ways than at any other time in our history. More importantly, some of these technology enthusiasts have gone beyond having technological-driven visions about the future to be actively engaged in a diverse set of activities aimed at shaping the future they envision. These are not just people with visions about the future, they are visioneers.
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Notes
This is also often said of science fiction, especially when it is too radical or if the required societal changes are too huge.
Among the attendees are the greatest engineers, scientists and thinkers in the world, a number of entertainment industry celebrities and the senior executives of various companies.
Neither of the two cases mentioned, Singularity University or XPRIZE visioneering, requires one to be a top university scientist, corporate engineer or the like. Moreover, they gather people from different age groups and nationalities. While these forms of promoting visioneering and visioneers can thus serve as a good starting point, it is important to keep in mind that participants in these two events do have certain profiles that are by no means representative of the general public.
While I acknowledge that a number of social and political movements may already exist, as well as other fields involved in visioneering, these are still driven by a very select group of individuals, as in the examples of SU and the XPRIZE visioneering event. Thus my aim here is merely to emphasize the need to continue creating scope for visioneering in many more areas and spheres of society.
We could perhaps expand the general understanding of technology to one that includes social institutions, methods and institutionalized habits of thought (cf. [6]).
I would like to raise the question here of whether national and international research, development and innovation programmes and funding schemes, inasmuch as they are mostly focused on addressing national/global societal challenges and have an impact on regulatory frameworks and public perception with regard to technology acceptance, are or should be considered as a form of visioneering project. My tentative answer is that they could. However, I believe it is important to acknowledge the processes and motives underlying these programmes and schemes (such as how much the general public and society as a whole are involved and how often outcomes are driven by political interests). Although I do not have a final answer to this, I would nonetheless like to leave this point open in order to maintain a discussion of these important issues.
I use the term individualistic framework here to refer to the idea that visioneering projects take into consideration only the visions of an individual (or very select group of individuals).
Moreover, while some could argue that techno-utopian visioneering generally constitutes merely the individual manifestations of social processes, the important thing to note here is that a more collective visioneering would be predominantly a social rather than an individualistic enterprise even if both are underlain by a social process. In addition, while I acknowledge that more collective visioneering can be done in an inclusive manner, it is not an inherent feature of it, nor should it imply that it would not lead to narrow visions.
My contention here is merely to stress that the dominant visioneering discourse is not sufficiently democratic as yet, not that there are no visioneering examples that are sufficiently democratic.
I thank one of my reviewers for this insight.
I am not suggesting here that only techno-enthusiast visioneers have an impact on policy, discourse and technological paths, as there are examples of more societal visioneering approaches that have had tremendous impact on society. While it is true that the main assumption is that techno-utopian visioneers may create greater impact than other types of visioneers, there is no empirical evidence to suggest that this is necessarily the case.
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Acknowledgments
I kindly thank Mike Van der Loos and Kieran Donaghue, as well as the reviewer’s comments, which have helped to improve this manuscript.
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Cabrera Trujillo, L.Y. Visioneering and the Role of Active Engagement and Assessment. Nanoethics 8, 201–206 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-014-0199-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-014-0199-5