A short essay which describes some of the issues that are covered in "The New Nature"

Human development has been characterized by us gradually taking over more and more control over the world we live in. We are shaping it to our liking and to fit our purposes, and we have come quite a long way in that respect. On a daily basis weâre no longer at the mercy of nature for food, comfort and survival. These days, in many cases itâs rather the other way around; Our natural environment is at our mercy.

Since the invention of nuclear weapons we have had the power to wipe out most of the life on the planet. We have changed the global climate, no less, to the point where we are having international conferences to discuss the proper way to deal with our impact. Another example: With medicine we can cure diseases that untill recently were fatal. Pneumonia, diabetes... thereâs a long list of killing illnesses, that we can now handle as mere inconveniences.

The ultimate example of humans taking control over nature is biotechnology. Genetic engineering will allow us not only to change the makeup of plants and animal we have domesticated. We can now start to design ourselves, improving our health, to live longer or to delete traits that we find undesireable.

As the American author Steward Brand has put it: We have become as gods and we might as well be good at it.

As we grow more knowledgeable of the world and its workings, we loose our innoscence. When we know enough about things to control and shape them, we take over the responsibility for what happens with them. We canât just blame God any longer.

And knowledge can not become unknown again. Weâre given the knowledge to choose, and so we can not choose not to choose. Not acting upon our information is a choice as well.

The biological paradigm

Another important development is that our tools are becoming life-like, first of all in the field of information technology. Increasingly the objects around us will be bestowed with some sort of computer intelligence. As microprocessors are becoming cheaper, more powerfull and smaller, they will be built into almost anything - cars, eye glasses, shoes, light fixtures...

Computer scientists talk of "ubiquitous computing" and "Things That Think". Not only will these objects be able to compute, they will also communicate, with us and among each other, to exchange data and to coordinate actions. Like humans they will use the Internet and as the software evolves, programs will travel around the net, searching for information, negotiating deals, taking care of business for their human owners.

We will be in a close relationship to our "agents", as they are referred to, and as time passes, they will get smarter, and through their constant observation of our needs and habits, they will get to know us intimately in order to service us better.

We will seek their advice in many matters, and increasingly, in one area after another, we will realize, that the computer is superior to us, when it comes to knowledge or figuring out solutions to a problem.

Computerprograms have reached a complexity that in many respects resembles life: they can learn, evolve, and have offspring without humans giving them the precise instructions on how to do so. Computer scientist Chris Langton has coined the term "artificial life", arguing that life is a process that can run in the circuits of silicon chips just as well as in organic chemistry.

To keep creating more powerfull and complex systems scientists have started using principles taken from biology rather than from electronics or mechanics.

Till now high technology has been characterized by linearity, top-down control, order and predictability.

In contrast, in the new biological paradigm of technology advanced systems are characterized by being circular, fuzzy, non-linear and evolving from the bottom up.

Rather than an engineer creating a system with all details worked out ahead, complex software and large systems (the internet being an obvious example) are evolved over time, constantly changing as new solutions appear that are better fit for the current situation.

In synergy our technologies also exhibit another characteristic of complex biological systems; properties that emerge from the interaction within the system, and makes it something more than the sum of the individual parts.

We are merging with our tools

Some of the fundamental, traditional boundaries in science and in our perception of the world are blurring. The distinction between biology and technology, between whatâs natural and whatâs artificial, even between living organisms and dead matter are not as clearcut as they used to be.

We usually see ourselves as seperate from the tools we have created and use, but in many cases we might as well think of our tools as integrated additions to our body and to our species in general.

Lots of people wear glasses, hearing aids, dental fixtures, pacemakers or other prostesises without which they couldnât live their life with the opportunities and convenience they have today. When you wear glasses, you rarely think about them, you are so used to them, they become second nature.

Itâs very likely that many more devices will be become second nature to us; something which we always carry with us, like clothes or glasses. Wearable computing seems to be the next wave in consumer appliances. Already, many of us rarely leave home without a walkman, a laptop computer, cellular phones, beepers or pocket computers. In few years we will be able to stay in constant touch with a worldwide net of information and communication. We will record, transmit or watch sound and video, have access to e-mail and personal files at any time, probably through a device, that looks like an ordinary pair of glasses, linked wirelessly to a powerful computer imbedded in our clothes, our wristwatch - or the soles of our shoes.

Marshal MacLuhan described the media as an extension of our nervous system and perhaps that is the most appropriate way of understanding our relationship to these new technologies. Information technology lets us sense whatâs happening almost anywhere on earth. We can look from the farthest galaxies or at single atoms. We can communicate instantenously with a billion other humans, we can draw on incredible computing power and imcomprehensible amounts of data.

This changes us a species. We achieve new senses and abilities, and once we take the technology for granted we change our society and the environment we live in accordingly. After a while you simply canât function properly without the new technological tools. Living in Los Angeles without a telephone, a TV and a car, is like having severe disabilites.

One global organism

We are in fact living in a new nature. Weâre different and the world is different, and we canât just disconnect again and return to the way things used to be. Thereâs no way back to nature. We tend to think of nature as something static or pristine. If something is percieved as natural, it usaually means "untouched by humans". But nature is not static. Nature is constantly evolving, changing, creating and destroying - and we humans are part of that evolution. We will evolve into something different, just as weâve evolved into something different than the monkeys we once were.

An interesting aspect of our new, electronic nervous system is that to a large extent we share it with others, potentially with everyone else on the network. It hints at the realization of a sort of common global brain, with shared senses, a shared memory and collaborative thinking.

Globalization is a buzzword of our times, and with good reason. Humanity is rapidly being knit closer together. Old barriers have been removed, we live in realtime, seeing events instantly as they happen around the planet, we can participate and act regardless of geographical distances.

In the financial markets, in trade, in politics, culturally and through our technology the world in effect functions as one system rather than the more or less seperate and discrete national or local systems of earlier. Importantly, this is also the case when it comes to the environment. Even people who do not have telephones, TVâs or in other ways participate in the global economy feel the effects of our technological world on their environment, for instance in the form of unstabile weather or rising water levels.

It is tempting to try to see our integration into one global system in the context of "complexity theory" - a fairly young science which seeks to understand the general patterns of behaviour that are common to all complex systems.

The leading place for the study of complexity is the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Here, scientists from a wide range of disciplins gather to compare observations from medicine, economics, physics, biology, meteorology etc. It turns out that all complex systems , whether itâs the stockmarket, the weather, metropolitan traffic or a population of dinosaurs seem to develop according to some common underlying patterns. This implies that observations from one type of system can be usefull in understanding other, completely different complex systems.

Complex systems can change very quickly, because of feedback effects, and because many small interactions of the elements in the system accumulate or suddenly concur. In these unstabile periods even a tiny action can provoke large and unpredictable changes.

Complex system can also have emergent properties. The beehive is often used as an example of how a complex system can have abilities that are much more sophisticated than any of the individual components, and which we would be impossible to predicts by looking at the parts of the system individually.

In his book, Out of Control, the editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly describes the ambiguity of a beehive: Is a beehive a cooperation between individual, seperate beings or are the bees merely parts of a larger organism, the hive?

He goes on to argue that we humans, in connection with our technology, are become a single organism, like a beehive, an organism which is likely to have some kinds of behaviour or even consciousness that far transcend the capabilities of any single person.

So perhaps that is our new nature, the next step in our evolution, the integration of us all into one global organism.

Itâs a powerfull, even romantic idea. However, even if we might not litteraly become one, itâs a usefull metaphore for understanding our relationship to each other in the context of globalization.

In particular it gives a framework for understanding what actions can be taken to ensure that the development will be positive and good for humans. Which of the two it will be is not a given thing.

The two faces of technology

All technology seems to have two faces. New technologies can offer us wealth, convenience, health or other benefits, but there are always side-effects, and often they are completely unpredictable and show up at times and places that are far from where the immediate benefits where enjoyed.

Also, the same technology can be used in very different ways and contexts. One good example is registration. We are likely to be living in a much more transparent society in the future. For every new device and every proces that is digitized we will experience that the computers will notice what we are doing, and it will remember it and use the data to evaluate us the next time we use it. The detailed registration of our habits, need, likes and dislikes is a prerequisite in order for the system to service us in an intelligent fashion and on an individual basis. It is the key to many of the advances in our relationship to information technology. However, the same information could add up to a very detailed profile that makes it possible to check and maybe control almost all aspects of our life.

We are facing a number of those technological dilemmas. The internet will offer each of us the possibility to watch exactly the information we personally want. This is great tool to get things achieved and gain knowledge. On the flip side it will mean that couch potatoes can sink even deeper into passively consuming entertainment and information that never contradicts the worldview they are always presented with. Some people will have more knowledge than anyone before them, others will degenerate into a narrow sliver of reality which they can barely share with others.

We can become aware and conscious of the realties of our society - or we can shut off, be numbed and indifferent to anything but sitcoms, sports and softporn. Information technology can flatten hierarchies, but it can also create great differences and in-equality.

With every technological advance we are upping the ante in a gamble about our future well being. The benefits we can gain are larger, but so are the riscs. The french philosopher Paul Virillo thinks that all technologies carry a disaster within them. We have yet to see what the equivalent of Chernobyl will be on the internet or in biotechnology.

Turning the world into money

The effects of a technology are to a large extent determined by which values society wishes to further. At the moment, itâs money.

Market economy is spreading to all parts of the globe. Itâs a system that basically only aknowledges money. All other values are important only according to the amount of money people will pay to enjoy them.

When it comes to business decisions, if thereâs is an ethical or aesthetic dilemma, it is always the solution likely to make the most money that will win.

Itâs not necessarily ill intended, even if a decision will have huge human costs - for instance when laying off people. Itâs rather a completely logical decision in order to make money and stay in business. We have set up a system to create money, and thatâs what it does, like a blind, indifferent computerprogram.

The american sociologist Benjamin Barber describes the resulting society as "MacWorld", and he points out some of the unintended sideeffects that the focus on money has. It tends to create uniformity because companies will aim at the lowest commom denominator - be it in food or movies - in order to maximise their market.

The emphasis on money also tends to create social exclusion. As operations are streamlined, employees are fired, and the remaining will have to work faster. Itâs a vicious circle of competetion between ever larger companies - a winner-takes-all society.

At some point the gap between the poor and the rich in society becomes so great that the costs for the rich of keeping the poor at bay excedes the profits from further economic growth.

From an environmental point of view the quest for money translates into companies consuming ressources at an increasing speed, untill the point of depletion, scarcity or a breakdown of the ecological system.

Considering that the world population will rise to above 10 billion people, most of whom will be consuming considerably more than today, it seem likely that we run into some kind of shortage, either of natural ressources or places to absorb our wastes.

Again this can develop to the point where economic growth destroys more than it creates.

The blind power of our creations

The consequences of either tighter social or environmental circumstances could be that the technologies that now enable each of us to be free to do and consume what we wish, might instead be used to ensure that nobody steps beyond a very tight limit to individual freedom of action and consumption. A sort of eco-fascism.

In case of these sorts of crisises - of which there have been many through history - our userfriendly technology would show its other face, with a power like never before.

Hopefully, things will not develop to far in that direction, although sometimes it seems that the system we live in keeps going in a direction that none really wish as private persons, but none the less noone seems to have the power to change the course.

Itâs ironic that the system of technology and business-organisations that we have constructed to conquer and control nature, now is threatening to wrestle control from us.

Machines are taking over jobs and decisionmaking, and the pursuit of such an abstract value as money is steering the development of society. Itâs evident in the global financial markets, which not even nations can control any longer. We see the blind power of the system in development like the increasing traffic congestion, which everybody hates, but no one seems capable of reversing. The problem is one of interests conflicting across dimensions. On an individual level our actions may make sense, but accumulated on a global scale it gets out of hand. We may deplore the paparazzis that drove princess Diana to her death, but each person glancing at the pictures and the gossip contributed - just a little bit.

Our technology is so advanced that we can do anything, it seems. But what do we want? Itâs a bit like King Midas who wished that everything he touched be turned into gold. Is money really all we want? Are we willing to take the increasing riscs it will require to keep the economy growing and growing?

There are measures we can take to reduce the riscs of social or environmental breakdowns, and some of these measures do not necessarily imply a complete revolution in the way our economy works.

As it is, the marketplace does not work properly, simply because the number one signal that we base our actions upon is misleading. The prices we are paying generally do not reflect the true cost of what we buy.

We pay nothing or very little for the environmental damages that our consumption causes and nothing to compensate for the fact that the non-rewable ressources we use will not be available in the future.

Currently the price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States is close to 1 dollar. In Denmark it is generally recognized that a liter (approx. one fourth of a gallon) of gasolin should cost about $ 2.50 if the environmenal costs of driving should be covered. That price would be ten times higher than what americans pay at the moment.

In principle the market forces are the most effecient means of allocating ressources. Higher prices will encourage people to spend less or subsitute their consumption with other, cheaper goods.

Around the world governments generally tax work, but subsidize transportation, water or electricity. In the case of gasoline the costs that are not picked up directly by the consumer (health problems, pollution, accidents...) are in stead payed by the state.

So we try to minimize our use of human labor, but have very little encouragement to develop products that use less natural ressources.

One could think of prices as a "field of gravity". If revenues weâre collected mainly by taxing natural ressources, it would encourage us to save ressources, while allowing us to employ humans much more, since labor is now much cheaper.

In my opinion an ecological taxreform along those lines is an absolute necessety if we want avoid a seriously negative development in the coming years.

There is more to life than money

Adjusting prices to reflect environmental and perhaps even social costs could reduce risc while staying within the basic logic of money being the only value that really counts.

Obviously, there are other values than money and there have been societies where some of those carried as much importance as we assign money today. Religious beliefs and an emphasis on equality are values that have been tried with varying success.

It may be hard to imagine how a society could give immaterial values such a high priority, itâs much easier at a personal level to feel that there are values that are as important as money, and that they are important in their own right - not because they can be translated into a particular price we are willing to pay to experience them.

Personally I can suggest three values, that I feel we should put more emphasis on: Quality, creativity and love.

We tend to choose quantity over quality. In order to keep up with the people we see on TV, we will settle for cheap imitations of their riches. We get a lot of mediocre, generic stuff that we barely enjoy before hurrying on to the next acquisition. Quality is expensive, because it usally requires more human work to produce. However it doesnât need to require more natural ressources, in fact things of quality are likely to last longer before they are discarded and replaced.

Creativity and art are values that lift our existence out of the ordinary. Art is also an important way of communicating complex understandings in a compact fashion, the messages being understood at an intuitive level. Also, creativity is something special to humans, it is where we use our sense of aesthetics.

Love goes beyond intimate relationships. We can make room for love in

our society and daily life by supporting care, nursing, service. But love takes time, and time is expensive presently.

Love is also a kind of ethics, another uniquely human value.

Quality, creativity and love are values that can give us a higher quality of living. We have a real need for them and we get great pleasure from them. They are values which can be capitalized, and thus contribute to economic growth, but they donât inherently require a massive use of natural ressources.

In fact, they fit very well with the need for a dematerialization of the economy. We need to de-couple economic growth from growth in consumption of natural ressources.

This happens also to fit perfectly with the main trend in the economy of the information age. Nicolas Negroponte, director at the Medialab at MIT, calls it substituting bits for atoms. By using knowledge and information we can build products that are better, yet use less materials. The trend is evident, when you compare an older car, a refrigerator or a cellphone with a modern version.

Finally, quality, creativity and love are values that are unique to humans - one might argue that they are values that in fact define us as humans. As computers become more intelligent it will become ever more important for humans to focus on areas that machines cannot take over any time soon - if ever.

Machines may one day learn to be creative and caring, but they will be so in a machine kind of way, delivering it based on our descriptions, by the bucketfull if need be. However, aestethics, ethics and love are irrational, and constantly changing because we change tastes or our relationship to one another changes. As Ian Pearson, a futurist at BTâs research labs in England puts it: "I donât want to read machine poems, I donât want to wake up at a hospital with a robot nurse at my bedside. We want humans, because we are humans".

As manual labor and numbercrunching is taken over by machines, what will be left for us to will be things that we used to think of as luxuries: being artists and caring for each other.

We must choose ourselves

Meanwhile, how do we make those values count, how do we turn them into priorities that are as solid as money?

In my opinion it will eventually happen automatically even if we just leave the system alone. Inevitably environmental and social problems will become so aggravating, that we have to start caring for eachother, have to start seeking immaterial growth and we have to concentrate on whatâs uniquely human in order to stay on top of the machines.

But before we reach that point things could get rather nasty and many would suffer terribly. The sooner we could make a conscious change away from that development, the better.

On the other hand, imposing values by decree has gotten a bad reputation. Weâve seen that the strong central ruling of fundamentalism and communism doesnât work.

Change in values must come frem the bottom up. To the extent we want our governments to support those values by subsidies or laws, we will have to vote for it. The same is true in relationship to industry; we will get more of what we are buying.

The main thing is that we decide what we want. We can choose a direction, but unless we deliberately do so, by default we will slide further along the path of turning everything into money.

Let me tell what I want: I want more than just money, and I want to live in a context where there is more that matters than just ME and my satisfaction.

I would like to feel more as a citizen and less as a consumer. A consumer has no responsibilities, as a consumer you are free to do and consume whatever you wish - as long as you pay for it.

The citizen has obligations and rights because the citizen belongs to a community whose members are mutually commited to eachother. To some extent the citizen must forego individual gain for the sake of the common good.

Today the main emphasis of popular culture is individual freedom. Freedom to realize your full potential and freedom to consume.

In my opinion some of the words that will characterize our relationships in the coming years are quite contrary to that, they are words like: obligations, interdepence, accountability, responsibility, solidarity, family/tribe and longterm commitments.

As the British sociologist Anthony Giddens has observed, we are living after the end of nature and tradition. Whatever is natural or a tradition to us, is something we chose. We are not committed as citizens, to a familiy or to the ecosystem on the planet. And should we get tired of being commited, we can always opt out. We are free.

We have to choose it ourselves. A sense of belonging or solidarity can not be dictated - people will find ways around their obligations and the restraints if they donât truly identify with the community they are commited to.

Increasingly, though, I think it will become obvious that we all are part of one system and that we all are interdependent. This brings us back to the consequences of globalization. Fear is not a sufficient motivation for longterm fundamental change. The challenge is to come up with a vision of an alternative to MacWorld, something we want enough to struggle for it and perhaps give up some of the niceties of our current lifestyle.

We need a myth to understand the world through, and maybe that myth is that that we are becoming one world, and that we have to care for the environment and eachother. In a way this is what ecology is all about. Ecology tells us that everything is connected in circles, that the way we harvest ressources and what we leave behind to be re-circulated in the system is important to keep the system in balance.

In practice it can be very hard to determine what is the correct way of behaving. Itâs hard to be motivated when the ressources we use seem to come out of socket in the wall, or from the shelves in the supermarket. We rarely see what becomes of our wastes downstream.

One of the consequences of our close electronic connections might be that we develope an almost instictive understanding of what actions would be appropriate in relation to the total system.

We are developing great tools that can enhance our abilities and our convenience. If we choose to, we can live lives rich with quality, creativity and love. To me that would be a very attractive goal for the future.