SHOOT: And in that web, intricately part of it, is social media. Social media, once it embraces urgent issues - not because someone asks them to, but because it becomes common knowledge, change is likely to be drammatic and widespread. There's hope in that, but right now, social media is still a baby, barely able to speak beyond gurgles, barely able to recognise what is nourishing and what isn't. Twitter is perhaps the first baby steps to a simple integrated system, the precursor to something more sophisticated and powerful.
Scientific and technological progress continues to accelerate. IBM promises a computer at 20,000 trillion calculations per second by 2011, which is estimated to be the speed of the human brain. And nanomedicine may one day rebuild damaged cells atom by atom, using nanobots the size of blood cells. But technological progress carries its own risks. "Globalisation and advanced technology allow fewer people to do more damage and in less time, so that possibly one day a single individual may be able to make and deploy a weapon of mass destruction."
The report also praises the web, which it singles out as "the most powerful force for globalisation, democratisation, economic growth, and education in history". Technological advances are cited as "giving birth to an interdependent humanity that can create and implement global strategies to improve the prospects for humanity".
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