Visioneering’s Value
Visioneering’s Value
This chapter argues that regardless of the reasons that compelled them, people such as Drexler and O'Neill, by combining their broad views of the future with technical skills, experience, and research, took speculative ideas out of the hands of sci-fi writers and technological forecasters and put them on firmer ground. Although visioneers' ideas may sit outside the mainstream and require considerable work to establish their legitimacy, their work toward that end secures a beachhead where exploratory notions can exist while entrepreneurial scientists and engineers mobilize and push things one way or the other. By inspiring (or provoking) people, visioneering helps reveal the future as something other than some neutral space that people move into without friction. Instead, it is a terrain made rough by politics, ethics, and economics as well as people's hopes and anxieties.
Keywords: science, technology, visioneering, K. Eric Drexler, Gerard O'Neill
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
