Description
This handbook catalogs all the ways in which scientific and technical fields can combine far more effectively than in previous times, in the service of humanity. Scientists and engineers have long been aware of the tension between narrow specialization and multidisciplinary cooperation, between bottom-up and top-down approaches, between short-term and long-term perspectives, and between individual and collective effects, but now a major transformation is in process. Nature is a single coherent system, and diverse methods of scientific and engineering investigations should reflect this interlinked and dynamic unity. Accordingly, general concepts and ideas should be developed systematically in interdependence, with cause-and-effect pathways, for improved outcomes in knowledge, technology, and applications. At the same time, industrial and social applications rely on integration of disciplines and unification of knowledge. Thus, convergence is both a fundamental principle of nature and a timely opportunity for human progress.
What Is Convergence?
The initial framework developed in over a decade of professional conferences established connections between nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and new technologies based on cognitive science (Roco and Bainbridge 2003; Roco and Montemagno 2004; Bainbridge and Roco 2006a, b). Subsequently, emphasis was given to the social and ethical implications of scientific research and engineering development and thus the convergence of all technical fields with society itself (Roco et al. 2013). The core ideas are that convergence:
• Advances an integrative approach across human dimensions, encompassing value systems, operating at societal and global scales, while remaining valuable for each individual person
• Is based on the material unity at the nanoscale, integrated systems, and information universes, connected via human behavior and other integrators
• Is best facilitated by a holistic approach with shared methodologies, theories, and goals, which is quite different from traditional forms of collaboration in which a division of labor separates disciplines from each other
• Renews the focus on people’s capabilities and human outcomes, rather than allowing decisions to be technology driven, and seeks to transcend existing human conflicts to achieve vastly improved conditions for work, learning, aging, and physical and cognitive wellness and to achieve shared human goals
Convergence is more than simply multidisciplinary collaboration. Yes we can learn something about how a shark swims through collaboration between an oceanographer and a biologist who divide the questions into two distinct areas, outside the skin of the shark and inside. But the shark is part of the larger system comprising the ocean in which it swims, including the other fish it chases after, and the dissolved oxygen that keeps it alive from moment to moment. So one way of conceptualizing convergence is in terms of complex systems that are the subjects of scientific study or engineering design. But as with the shark and the ocean, there are also two kinds of systems involved, the second being the social system of human beings who seek knowledge about the life of a shark, composed of scientists, engineers, students, and the general public.
Convergence includes all relevant areas of human and machine capability that enable each other to allow society to answer questions and to resolve problems that isolated capabilities cannot, as well as to create new competencies, knowledge, technologies, and products on that basis. Principles and methods to facilitate convergence are based on the interdependence between various domains of nature and human activity and their evolution in time as summarized in another chapter in this volume (Roco 2015). At the core of science and technology convergence in the first part of the twenty-first century is the convergence and emergence of four foundational and transformational S&T fields, briefly called nano-bio-informa-tion-cognitive technologies (NBIC).
Whenever it is valuable to do so, sciences and fields of engineering should share their concepts, research tools, information resources, and connections with the wider economic and social system. When one field borrows from another, the result is often a surge of creativity, as ideas combine and methods provide leverage for each other. But this does not mean that convergence should be homogenization. A tragic example of what must be avoided was Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union that suppressed progress for decades (Medvedev 1969). Perhaps because Darwinian theories of biological evolution by natural selection from random variation were associated in many people’s minds with the struggle for wealth and power in capitalist societies, a Marxist society was ready for the perhaps more optimistic theory that biological characteristics were easily acquired. One practical result was degradation of the seed stocks for agricultural crops, for example, varieties of wheat that grew better in different parts of the vast nation, as seeds that were adapted for different climates were mixed together. More generally, progress in biology was retarded. Any orthodoxy can retard progress to some degree, and merging science and politics is risky in many ways. Lysenkoism is certainly not an example of what this handbook means by convergence.
Yet many of the chapters express hopes that science and engineering can merge in positive ways with society, allowing more people to understand the emerging truths about nature and participate actively in creating the technology of tomorrow. Throughout history, progress has resulted in progressive differentiation of society into an ever more complex system of somewhat separate social institutions, professions, and social groups (Spencer 1896). Yet this need not contradict convergence, if we conceptualize dynamic systems as following successive processes of convergence and divergence. This coherence process has been identified first in science and engineering progress (Roco 2002). Yes, a complex system consists of many parts, but they are integrated, ideally harmonizing but certainly influencing each other. Such a dynamic system cannot be understood in terms of a single idea but in terms of a system of ideas. One approach is to identify separate theories of convergence, prior to any attempt to integrate them, with special attention to the possibility that they define the present day as a revolutionary watershed requiring convergence if human progress is to continue.