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Rapidity and acceleration of development

Emerging technologies have some degree of acceleration that sets them apart from other technologies and presents distinct governance challenges.


From a comment from Tim Harper:

"Just to clarify, our definition of ‘emerging’ means that the technologies also have some degree of acceleration that sets them apart from other technologies. This could be as a result of massive funding programs as we saw with nanotechnologies, a sudden unleashing of a range of applications as we are seeing with regenerative medicine, or simply an increased public awareness leading to an increased level of debate (e.g. geoengineering).

As Andrew mentioned, it’s very much a work in progress and I’m sure that every committee charged with writing a report or strategy will spend several man years on their own definition and disregard ours.

Our motivation for even attempting a definition was to distinguish areas we considered as emerging technologies such as synthetic biology and geoengineering from emerging ‘internet’ technologies such as Facebook and the rest of Web2.x in order to prevent confusion.

At least we now have a starting point for anyone to embellish or disagree with, which is, after all, the way that science and technology develops best."

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Rapidity and acceleration of development
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