Technology and Global Change

Advances in areas as diverse as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, nanotechnology, biotechnologies, genetic engineering, and renewable energy are transforming societies and economies profoundly, altering the nature of work, transportation, medicine, education, communication, crime, public safety, and policy-making. They also impact the environment in many ways, open up news responses to climate change, and raise serious questions about sustainability in the broadest sense—environmental, economic, social, cultural. Both because of how technically complicated these advances are, and how rapidly they are changing, many of these technologies as well as their impacts on individual societies and the global order at large remain ill understood amidst ongoing policy debates about their assumed benefits and risks as well as unintended consequences.