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Today's
key trend
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| What is it?
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The most significant development
of our time is the need to boost the mind to a new level of functiong --
a level consistent with information-age challenges. This need is underscored by
a two-pronged trend toward spiraling opportunity and chaos:
- Electronic systems are
moving into the human mental space, bringing unprecedented opportunities and
dangers. Ever-smarter electronics can vastly extend the human mind or displace
thinking humans and disrupt lifestyles. It's already happening. People who fail
to rise to a new mental level will find themselves marginalzed.
- Accelerating interactivity
is spawning netative as well as positive synergy.
Terrorism, addiction, computer viruses, and unethical business practices are only
tips of a multipoint iceberg. A new level of mentality is needed to assure that
positive synergy wins out.
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| Why be concerned?
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Depending on what we do
about our minds, the result could be social chaos and a bleak future, or a golden
age of mind-powered human interaction.
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Networks and devices
are getting smarter all the time, offering to empower us or threatening to crowd
us out. At the same time, fewer and fewer people can make more of a difference,
for good or ill.
POSITIVE: Electronic
systems can extend our powers as never before, and anyone on the planet can confer
instant benefits anywhere.
NEGATIVE: Jobs of
many types are being redefined or eliminated; companies and whole societies have
no choice but to restruture; perceived inequality motivates some to act distuptively,
and others, unethically. Like it or not, everyone needs to scramble and adjust.
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| What can we
do about it?
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We need a strategy for
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- living with the two-pronged
trend,
- profiting from it,
- minimizing or sidestepping
its dangers, and
- guiding the trend in the
right direction, through a general elevation of human mentality.
The
strategy is ...
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Copyright
2001 EraNova Institute
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