Pardon me for coming late to this party, but an April 14 Washington Post opinion piece that continues to be reprinted in other papers is worth checking out.  It’s “The Future Is Now,” by Joel Achenbach, about the speed at which technological change is reshaping our lives:

Science and technology form a two-headed, unstoppable change agent. Problem is, most of us are mystified and intimidated by such things as biotechnology, or nanotechnology, or the various other -ologies that seem to be threatening to merge into a single unspeakable and incomprehensible thing called biotechnonanogenomicology. We vaguely understand that this stuff is changing our lives, but we feel as though it’s all out of our control. We’re just hanging on tight, like Kirk and Spock when the Enterprise starts vibrating at Warp 8.

Things are moving so far, so fast that it’s well nigh impossible to keep up.  The solution proposed by Christine Peterson of the Foresight Nanotech Institute: “Read science fiction.”

Science is becoming ever more specialized; technology is increasingly a series of black boxes, impenetrable to but a few. Americans’ poor science literacy means that science and technology exist in a walled garden, a geek ghetto. We are a technocracy in which most of us don’t really understand what’s happening around us. We stagger through a world of technological and medical miracles. We’re zombified by progress.

Peterson has one recommendation: Read science fiction, especially “hard science fiction” that sticks rigorously to the scientifically possible. “If you look out into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong,” she says. “But if it doesn’t look like science fiction, it’s definitely wrong.”

We have folks looking seriously at the technological literacy problem, which can partially be dealt with by reforming science education so that it’s more relevant to broader audiences — not by dumbing it down, but rather by broadening the focus in Biology, for example, beyond just the training of future doctors and biology teachers to include teaching of relevance to future biotech employees, future informed citizens, etc. 

Achenbach’s piece is quite good; the online discussion afterward is less interesting, but still worth reading.