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Designing the future!

Technocracy can be seen as the application of science to society. As such it is a multi-disciplined science. It can also been seen as a plan for society where technology is used for the benefit of the people, rather than maximise profit for the minority. Society can be seen as people plus technology but our methods of running this society today are people orientated and our current problems are technology related. Technocracy's plan is to run the technology as technology and use democracy to run the people part of sociaty.

On the technology side, in a technate (which is a state run according to the technocracy plan) experts use the knowledge in a particular area to direct the utilisation of resources in such a manner as to maintain a high standard of living. They are appointed to their positions on the bases of peer review and because they are the best person for that job, because of their skills, education, expertise and experience. This form of "governance" is different to any other, such as democracy, communism or theocracy that we have in our world today.

Underlining the ideas behind a technocracy is the application of scientific thinking and ideas. In other words, technocracy is based on rational thought and empirical evidence to support decisions made within a technocracy. This means that a technocracy is a hi-tech society where technology is used to benefit society. So, instead of introducing robots in factories and making people unemployed we would introduce robots into factories to reduce the work load on people and give them more free time and a better quality of life.

This brings us back to the another aspect of technocracy; it has as its goal the use of technology to improve the standard of living for people. Technology for the benefit of the people! That could mean less working hours, better health and a high standard of living. To achieve the goals of technocracy it is proposed that society should manage its resources and its production capabilities in a more intelligent way. That means planning should be done on a local level, spiralling up in a hierarchy to an overall control board giving general directions to meet demands of the technate. It means there should be a balance between ecology and technology, between supply and demand. If we manage our resources intelligently we should only take from the Earth what we need (recycling what we can) and we should only do so in a way that maintains and protects the ecosystem. This could be achieved by using energy as a means of measurement and control which involves registering the energy usage of a society and matching the supply to the demand (money would be no good as it is not a direct measure of anything as it has a property of being able to be generated out of nothing). Together with using environmentally friendly and energy efficient technology this would mean less waste and less destruction to our environment and we would be able to maintain a sustainable high standard of living. It also means a radical change to society; we could not manage our resources with today's money grabbing, self-centred methods.

But would such a system work? The ideas behind technocracy are rooted in science. They were first developed by the Technical Alliance of North America in the US. The Technical Alliance was composed of a group of scientist, engineers, mathematicians, architects and economists. They conducted a survey of the resources of the US. Much of the results and ideas behind technocracy are based in the research that they under took. This means that the ideas behind technocracy do have some bases in science and, therefore, have, in all probability, a good possibility of working.

What does this mean in a European context? That is what we are working on! Basically I could see the plan developed in the US as a good starting point for Europe with some small changes (I would see it as more distributed than the more centralised plan for the US because of the nature of Europe). I would also see it potentially being formed from the ground up (politicians and politics would not be much use here) formed from a network of self-sufficient communities each supporting the others and a network of informed supporters which then moves to a full technate as and when the current system runs into trouble and the people decide that a techante is the best way forward. We need, however, more research into this to be sure it will work in Europe (at the moment it exists as a good idea but we need to be more certain and the only way to do that is to conduct research and experiment).

On thing is certain and that is we can not continue the way we are forever. If peak oil doesn't get us then we have limits to growth anyway. Sooner or later we will have to change or have change forced upon us. In the end I think we have a great potential to build a better world. We could design a society where we would have a high standard of living, low working hours and more leisure time to spend with friends and family - if we put our minds to it!

Just as an aside, I only found out about peak oil this year but I have had a concern about our use of oil for many years. I even wrote to our local politician some years ago about how foolish it was to rely on a finite supply of a mineral slime! I got no reply.

These are my opinions and are not to be taken as an official statement of Technocracy Inc in the US nor NET (Network of European Technocrats) in Europe.