Bringing together experts in scientific and technological forecasting methodologies with their social consequences, outlining scenarios for the next 10 to 50 years, was the objective of the workshop “The future has already begun”, organized this Thursday by the Faculty of Chemical Engineering (FEQ) and by Nipe (Interdisciplinary Center for Energy Planning) at Unicamp. The first volume of the book was also launched at the event. The science and technology of the future: Applications of forecasting and prospecting methods in the scientific-technological and social sphere (Edições Brasil), with articles by authors from various teaching and research institutions.
Wagner dos Santos Oliveira, professor at FEQ and organizer of the workshop held in the auditorium of this unit, observes that the world is experiencing a very intense digital era, with social changes of equal magnitude. “We noticed that the areas of knowledge are strongly intertwining. Today engineering is linked to medicine, physics to engineering, in a change that is reflected in society through the so-called digital era. We are talking about forecasting methodologies – not feelings – that are very well established and based on mathematics. We are able to obtain visions of future scenarios with certain precision over a range of 10 to 50 years – above that, a little bit of the opinion (or feelings) factor comes into play.”
Given the changes in science and technology that have been occurring very quickly, a prediction highlighted by Wagner Oliveira, for example, is that jobs will disappear in the next 30 years. “Experts in the field foresee robots entering labor niches such as office employees, who perform routine services, such as accountants – robots have already entered the industry. It is important to draw attention to these predictions so that workers can adapt to new knowledge, minimizing the distressing factor of unemployment.”
The Unicamp professor finds it interesting, on the other hand, to foresee that robots will not occupy positions that require common sense, the power of human discernment, as in a large part of the humanities area – theater artists, novelists, judges, lawyers. “Robots lack consciousness, even for the most humble tasks: beds created by a gardener are still a work of art.
The workshop lectures focused on the industrial future, energy, education, nuclear energy, science and technology and society (employability), and also on technological maps and technological prospecting and trends. “An American colleague [Len Mei, from Illinois] will talk about technologies that will change the world, such as quantum computing. We will no longer have desktop computers, because we will work with chips connected to the cloud. In medicine, nanorobots will be introduced into the human body, aimed at fighting cancer cells, but which are capable of reproducing themselves – which could be a risk for us.”
Wagner dos Santos Oliveira is also one of the organizers of the book The science and technology of the future, together with Herlandi de Souza Andrade (Centro Paula Souza), Messias Borges Silva (USP) and Milton de Freitas Chagas Junior (Inpe). “The idea is to invite experts in forecasting methodologies to publish mainly medium and long-term forecasts (from 30 to 50 years), involving all areas of knowledge, precisely to be prepared for the future.”
