IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2013 - 51

claim these are ultimately a weak
link in his obvious scientific credentials and accomplishments. We
now extend our intellectual link and
credit to Mr. Kurzweil. Simultaneously, as good science and social
science requires us to do, we extend
our thinking and ideas to his scientific and engineering critics too. In
our seminars we assign the readings of Kurzweil juxtaposed against
those of Bill Joy ("Why the Future
Doesn't Need Us," in Wired Magazine) to help us better calibrate the
tendency for future studies to result
in utopian versus dystopian tales.
These are the limits of science. In
fact, quite correctly, we would state
that such types of prognostications
are not scientific products at all. But
as social scientists we would also
argue that much of the product of
political and economic science (that
which we practice) is not ultimately
scientific in outcome. Nevertheless,
such disciplines are useful, and
therefore future scenario thinking
in terms of extending our thought
about the trajectory of trending science and engineering are useful for
us too as we seek to calibrate it as
we go forward toward the future.
The value of thinking about
such technologies in advance with
regard to national and homeland
security and diplomacy (nationstate power), and to do so with
regard to the evolution of the interaction of humans and machines
and the ethics of such, we argue
is an important process against
the alternative. The alternative is
to do so in a nonsensical manner
without the aid of rational political
and economic thought as guides.
Frank Hahn may have best made
this point in 1993 as he made a
similar defense of the discipline of
economics against its status as the
"dismal science."
There have been discussions
of whether economics is a science or not. If science means
the serious, disciplined study
of observed phenomena, it

clearly is. If however, science
means uncovering 'laws' and
providing accurate inter-temporal predictions, I should
say that it is not. My impression is that most people interpret science in this latter way:
good reason therefore for
economists not to lay claim to
the mantle of science. When
they do claim it, they sooner
or later babble about 'the laws
of economics' and begin to
say much more than it is prudent to say. The subject gets a
bad name. Yet economics has
in fact cast much light and
it can be a powerful weapon
against nonsense. Certainly
if it did not exist, it would
urgently need inventing" [15].

Author Information
The author is Professor of Science,
Technology, and International
Affairs in the Department of International Studies, 439 Scott Shipp
Hall, Virginia Military Institute,
Lexington, VA, and Director of the
VMI-Hungarian National Defense
University exchange in Budapest,
Hungary. Email: burnettre@vmi.
edu.

Acknowledgment
This article is adapted from [1] and
is used with permission. An earlier version of this article also was
presented to a U.S. National Intelligence Council Science and Technology Committee Meeting at FBI
Headquarters in Washington, DC,
in Nov. 2012.
The author is a political scientist who has worked in multidisciplinary faculties at the Patterson
School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University
of Kentucky, and the College of
Integrated Science and Technology
at James Madison University. He
has benefitted from the contributions of several expert colleagues for
guidance, correction, and inspiration in disciplines beyond his own.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SUMMER 2013

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http://http:// http://www.airpower.au.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/ http://www.techcrunch.com http://http:// http://www.techcrunch.com/2012/04/04/apple-facebook http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ http://www.singinst.org/summit2007/ http://2012books http://www.CreativeCommons.org http://http:// http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ http://commons http://www.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AGoogle_Glass_

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