Goals of Ci'num 2007

Un article de WikiCinum.

Ci'Num's goal is not to predict the future, but to help maximize our individual and collective ability to produce and shape our future.

We bear, of course, prime responsibility for our future and that of our children, but we often act or speak as if this future did not (or no longer) depend on our actions, as if it was already written or was being written elsewhere, by others.

However, several signs lead us to believe that the future is more plastic, more uncertain - and therefore human - than this. Look at how the citizens of the world appropriate the Internet or mobile phones, invent or repurpose their uses and incorporate them into their lifestyles, use them to reach their own objectives - endlessly surprising Industry, regulators and researchers. Look at what came out when, during Ci'Num 2006, we let our imagination freely leap into the future and imagine it whole, powered by technology's new abilities, shaken by the dangers that emerge out of technology. Despite all the constraints that may reduce our margin of manoeuvre, despite all that should legitimately worry us into inaction, we can imagine our own paths towards the future: Mobilise or repurpose technologies, organise networks and mobilities, negotiate our place in space and our relationship to others, in order to make our future not just liveable, but desirable, stimulating, sweet, funny...

A large number of regional, national, continental or global foresight exercizes have produced future scenarios and extracted from these action plans, indicators, methodologies. They are an important collective asset to be used.

Ci'Num intends to produce two distinctive contributions to this landscape:

1- By focusing on the role of technology in the construction of the future - particularly the "intensive and intimate" technologies that emerge from the bio-nano-info-cogno (NBIC) convergence: ubiquitous technologies, that act more and more directly on our body and spirit, that provide us with an unprecedented power of understanding and action- and that produce risks proportionate to that power.

2- By focusing on the ways, tools and methods through which we become empowered to shape our futures, to increase the options available to future generations, while organising a less predatory link to the present's resources.

In other words, Ci'Num is not about choosing any given future, but about identifying (i) what our futures will have in common, and (ii) what is needed so as to let each and everyone feel capable of co-designing, discussing and co-producing his or her future.

The Ci'num 2007 Team : Daniel Kaplan Jean-Paul Fourmentraux Thierry Ulmet