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Rapid developments in technology - ranging from gene editing to cognitive manipulation to computer-brain interfaces - are rendering virtually every aspect of human beings contingent and subject to design. The military and security domain, because of its existential importance to states, is one realm in which human enhancements are likely to be most enthusiastically adopted. For nations with powerful militaries, enhanced warriors may offer solutions to a number of current challenges, including the need for nations to project power without suffering casualties; a decline in birth rates among globally powerful states; and humans’ operational limitations in combat environments that feature accelerating velocities, volumes, and varieties of information. But warrior enhancements also have the potential to destabilize laws of armed conflict and related international norms; likewise, they present difficult challenges in the ethical, institutional, and operational realms. Ultimately, technological change puts the nature of human conflict into flux - as well as the nature of humanity itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A principal result of the Industrial Revolution and subsequent technological development is the evolution of a planet where the dynamics of major natural systems are increasingly affected by human activity. This anthropogenic Earth is increasingly shaped not just by energy and material flows, the traditional concerns of environmentalists, but by information structures and cultural systems that begin to play out in complex ways across global systems. The combination of these information systems with accelerating technological evolution creates relationships and patterns that are not only difficult to perceive, but that are challenging in their complexity, and leads to profound questions about how best to construct an ethical, rational, and responsible world. Keywords: Anthropocene; Earth systems engineering and management; information and communication technology (ICT); macroethics; telework; urban systems

As governments around the world struggle to govern a multitude of emerging technologies, they often seek to harmonize their regulatory approaches. But there are at least 10 different reasons why nations may seek to harmonize their oversight of a specific technology, and discerning which of these rationales will apply to a specific technology is critical for selecting the optimal harmonization approach. The traditional approach is the negotiation of formal international treaties, but, as exemplified by the challenges of cybersecurity, such treaty-based approaches are too resource-intensive and difficult to be effective for most technologies. Accordingly, a new generation of more informal international governance tools are being explored, often grouped under the term “soft law.” They include private standards, guidelines, codes of conduct, and forums for transnational dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for earth systems engineering and management is discussed, with a focus on the Earth as a human artifact. Case studies involve adaptive management techniques in the Everglades, urban areas, global climate change mitigation, and the Internet.

Emerging technologies are not the danger. Failure of human imagination, optimism, energy, and creativity is the danger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Brad Allenby Determining the economic, social and environmental effects of business is a laudable goal. It is often difficult in practice, however, especially if a firm is not in a resource sector, where material and energy flows dominate impacts, but is in a service sector, where technology, culture, and social and environmental impacts are more important. Some of the potential issues involved in such cases can be illustrated by considering the information and communications technology industry, from production of artifacts to services and deeper cultural implications.

Byline: Brad Allenby Industrial ecology is one of a number of new fields of study, such as 'green chemistry' or 'ecological economics', that have deliberately reached across different disciplines in both name and substance. This raises a number of issues for the practitioner, including difficult questions of boundary and field content (when is something 'industrial ecology' and when is it a part of another dialogue?). Such issues are challenging enough. But industrial ecology raises even more complex questions, in particular the possibility that in some senses, industrial ecology is one of the first post-modern fields of study, in that, unlike most more traditional disciplines, it embodies not a single ontology, but a set of complex and, in some ways, mutually exclusive ontologies. How such multi-ontological fields can be conceptualised, and represented coherently through traditional institutional forms such as journals and societies, is not yet clear, but it is highly likely that the industrial ecology community as a whole will need to learn to do so.