International responses to technology: Concepts and trends

TLDR

Technological, ecological, political, economic, and social systems are increasingly globally intertwined, so changes in one area affect all others, yet international institutions struggle to keep pace. The study calls for restructuring international institutional frameworks to align with the altered constants of nature driven by science and technology. The authors pose questions about the foundations, principles, and goals of the proposed institutional restructuring.

Abstract

With increasing frequency and growing vehemence, we are being told that on our “only one earth” we are, for the first time, living a single history. By this is meant that technological, ecological, political, economic, and social environments are becoming so globally enmeshed that changes taking place in one segment of international society will have consequential repercussions in all others. An equally frequent and no less vehement remonstration attending this observation is that the scope and complexity of new scientific and technological developments are outpacing the capacities of our systems of international organization to manage them. The necessity has emerged, this line of reasoning continues, to restructure our international institutional frameworks in keeping with the unhitching of nature's constants which science and technology have effected. But on what basis? According to what principles? Toward what ends?