I have spent the past few weeks writing a chapter on neuropolicy for a book on converging technologies. Here is a small excerpt about the model I use to understand our emerging neurosociety:

"If forecasting a specific event or potential success of a new technology is difficult, then how can we confidently conceptualize the ways that converging technologies will impact society? Most attempts at long-term social forecasting fall short because they extrapolate isolated technical advances occurring in one or two industries with little regard to other equally powerful agents of change.

While technology is a primary initiator of societal change, it also coevolves within a socio-cultural landscape not completely of its own making. Effective social forecasting on the scale of decades involves developing qualitative scenarios that are informed by the historical interplay of technology, economics, politics and culture while remaining open to novel future conditions and combinations.

The model I use to understand the societal implications of converging technologies is not reductionist. Instead it is a way of ordering and examining historical processes in order to illuminate some recurrent tendencies that can be used to understand our past, present and future. The roots of this model grow out of the observations made by the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff and the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter who in 1920s and 1930s described half-century long waves of economic growth and decline reaching back to the 1700s. In more recent decades, economic historians Chris Freeman and Carlota Perez have expanded the model to encompass political and social trends through to the current information revolution. I extend this model further in order to understand the neurotechnology wave (2010-2060).

Here is what W. Brian Arthur, Citibank Professor at Santa Fe Institute thinks of the model that Perez has developed:

‘Before I read this book I thought that the history of technology was – to borrow Churchill’s phrase – merely “one damned thing after another”. Not so. Carlota Perez shows us that historically technological revolutions arrive with remarkable regularity, and that economies react to them in predictable phases. Her argument provides much needed perspective not just on history, but on our own times. And especially on our own information revolution.’