Resource Review

Resource Review

Introduction

Converging technologies refers to one of the most recent but central developments in the field of advanced technologies, evidently of crucial social importance: the synergy or confluence of the four major types of modern technology into a converging fusion. This is said to amount to a revolutionary breakthrough that will radically change our lives (Beckert, 2007).

Discussion

The four principal types of technology that are the protagonists of such convergence under which a constantly shifting lower-level disciplinary variety of their amalgamating technological subfields falls comprise nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive technology (Beckert, 2007). According to one of the dominant visions of this convergence, nanotechnology is of paramount importance, being its core element or underlying vehicle. What the phenomenon of technological convergence underlines is the fact that such a unifying pattern exhibited by modern advanced technology is not just a mere option or contingent eventuality, but an inevitable outcome of the nature of modern science and technology (Bainbridge & Roco, 2006). That the traditional internal barriers separating types of technology, either in terms of subject matter or principal method, are being undone is therefore something that should not surprise us. No further advance in any field of technology can be expected to take place without impacting on, or without having benefited by outcomes in, another.

However, nanotechnology, being a recent development that is still in the making, as well as a matter almost exclusively debated in reports that try to capture it and, what is more, recommend how it must be formulated, technological convergence assumes many forms and corresponding definitions. It is evolving practically as a result of new technical developments and interchanges of results, tools, and methods from one subfield of technical research to another, but it is also evolving conceptually as a result of being the subject matter of reports that more often than not act as manifestoes shaping the field. Consequently, nanotechnology's potential societal impact, how much the general public knows about it, or in what manner it is portrayed, all vary significantly? Policy recommendations are no exception to this variability. The more advanced technologies converge, therefore, the more divergent the conceptions concerning this process prove to be (Bainbridge & Roco, 2006).

Protean Form

This protean form is both the result of what is actually taking place at the level of technological practice itself, being a constantly evolving field comprising more than a single technological domain, but also a matter of ...