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5. IT for Human Survival: An Urgent Unmet Challenge 187

and in the Middle East, both of the Kurzweil persuasion and of the back-to-Abbasid
persuasion, to aggravate future conflicts just as it did in France in the 1770s when
aristocrats strengthened inequalities in French society. But how can we design IT
systems which actually make better use of the inner potential of all humans, in a
realistic way?

5.4 PRELIMINARY VISION OF THE OVERALL PROBLEM, AND OF THE
WAY OUT
Fig. 8.18 gives my view of the big picture of the growing pains of IT today. In tradi-
tional thinking, people have assumed that money and biology would be the ultimate
arbiters of human life, calling the shots. IT was just one more new means of
productiondimportant enough to cause massive changes, but not to change the basic
nature of the system. But with the IOT coming on fast, we are entering a new era
where IT rules over money, not vice versa, and we desperately need new paradigms
to hold things together. It may be very important that human potential also be
accelerated, somehow, to keep things from going totally crazy and unsustainable.
Fig. 8.19 summarizes my view of the massive change in paradigms we will need,
in order to survive the challenges ahead. Somehow we need to progress to the
right-hand side of this figure, and integrate and support all five of the more hopeful
new directions on the right. It is not yet obvious exactly how to do this, but that just
adds to the urgency of pushing hard not only to deploy new systems but to think
through the concrete possibilities.
This past paragraph already summarizes the global conclusions from all of this
work.

FIGURE 8.18
IT as part of the big picture.