While no one has ever been very good at predicting what is next to come, the possible future-scape painted by futurists suggests possibilities both frightening and exciting. The promise of technology, the hype of technology, is that it will cure the ails of the body and solve problems of the planet. The key question remains however whether or not concerns about quality of life and human relationships will be integrated into the design and evaluation of the technologies or the ensuing policies. Who will ask fundamental questions and conduct research about whether or not the advances are good for people and community, or life enhancing? Computing, sciences, and engineering dominate the interdisciplinarity of these technological pursuits with insufficient participation by the social and behavioral sciences and law, disciplines ideally positioned and suited to address the human impacts.

The likelihood is that advances in the genetic-robotic-info-nano-bio-physical-chemical technologies will move forward and some amazing discoveries will emerge that we would not wish to delay or impede. Where, however, are the boundaries between discovery and free enterprise and potentially destructive or self-defeating pursuits? If for example, we can agree that artificial red blood created through nanotechnology is "good" to offset blood shortages and extend life for the injured, then what do we do when our neighbor injects his or her child to ensure a competitive edge, a college athletic scholarship, and winning team because it also enhances performance? What happens when we use nanoparticles to heal our bodies only to find that they pass unfettered into the larger environment causing harm to basic ecological systems and organisms? Fundamentally the well being of people and the planet are at stake and we have no clear mechanism to decide what constitutes too much of a good thing, or system to evaluate unanticipated human risks and impacts.

Biotechnology and genetic engineering have allowed wonderful advances in reproductive technologies that enable families to give birth when they would not otherwise be able to bear children. Yet we fail to fully prepare families for the birth of multiples who often are produced and we have a dearth of research on the impact of a multiple birth to the attachment process despite numerous studies citing the critical role of attachment in academic, social, and interpersonal development of children, which sets the stage for success in adulthood. We can address the legal issues of who "owns" the baby in these unusual arrangements of shared genetic material but can we address the social and human issue of what it means that we have a system that regards genetic material as akin to intellectual property, or what it means for a caretaker to attempt to respond to the needs of three, four, or five babies simultaneously, or what it means to be a person who was in fact engineered? Can we address the legal testamentary issues that will arise with new generations that could be related through shared genetic material but not by any relationship that existed in real time? We have yet to sort out what it may mean legally and socially, to have a child born from genetic material engineered in a lab, aggregated from a databank, or lifted from a blood or hair sample centuries old.

America seeks to be a leader in global economy and there is a growing appreciation of diversity as a sound business goal that enhances productivity and financial performance. Yet, we lose a culture every decade and struggle to understand diversity when we are fully immersed in our own context and culture, which precludes us from understanding that our basic organization of thought and work is contextually grounded. For example, if we journeyed to another culture to observe the work ethic, we would be assuming that work ethic had meaning in the culture and was worthy of observation, when perhaps the civilization under observation might assign meaning to very different dimensions. Events suggest that the preservation of culture in the face of technology is evermore crucial. Some groups have acted to counterbalance the forces of technological change. For example, The Slow Cities League in Italy, an organization of over thirty regions, enacted regulations in 2001 to ban fast food and other aspects of technology because of their belief that their greatest natural local resource was culture, which was being subject to inexorable damage and change by industrialization and technology. Perhaps diversity itself is at risk in a world wherein all inhabitants view the same images and hear the same stories.

In this information technology era in which communications advances give rise to internet, wireless communications and virtual relationships, we know little of the impact on our health, work, well-being, and community. While there are some seminal studies to suggest that there are benefits as well as unanticipated negative consequences associated with information technologies, these studies have been limited. Decades of psychological research have documented the importance of live supportive relationships to health and mental health outcomes. What we do not know is whether or not virtual relationships offer the same benefits as live relationships or if the price of expedience, the need for remote communication and rapid information, will cost us our equanimity.

Many have been striving to bring the internet to people across the globe with good intention to increase literacy, information access, rule of law, and bring media attention to problematic political situations. Yet, what about the other less noble aspects that are part and parcel of the internet that will flood the psyche of people living in an entirely different cultural context? If, for example, an early adolescent uses the internet and prepares for a class debate on a timely subject like gay marriage, what does it mean that a search with a popular search engine entering the words "homosexuality & discrimination" results in dozens of raw pornographic images? Few expected that video phones would be used to capture and send images from locker rooms and washrooms. These advances raises questions yet unasked regarding who we are, as a culture, becoming and how are we to be together, one to another.

Advanced nanotechnologies refer primarily to those technologies arising at the interface of computers and biology, which will presumably have the capacity for intelligence and self replication. It is these technologies that hold the most promise for enhancing human memory and health, for surveillance, and security. It is these technologies that will give rise to fundamental questions regarding privacy, the meaning of being human, and social interaction. Notable is the fact that Swiss Re, one of the world's leading reinsurers and the world's largest life and health reinsurer, has advised the insurance industry to spare no reasonable expense to clarify the current uncertainties associated with nanotechnological risks. The blurring of the real and the virtual, human and machine, the increase in intelligence but perhaps not wisdom, will all pose unique dilemmas and call for the central and immediate involvement of the social, behavioral, and legal disciplines in the unfolding of this emerging field.

It is the purview of law, psychology, sociology, and medicine to undertake translational research that discloses the human risks, benefits, and impacts of technology broadly, and nanotechnology in particular. Law and regulation fundamentally structure human interaction and community; psychology involves itself with scientific problem solving on all human behavioral (and animal) issues, sociology addresses vital issues of how we live together. In partnership with biology, physics, chemistry, computing, and engineering, innovation that enhances quality of life is more likely.

Advancing technologies have given rise to this curious sense that anything is possible. People go to the moon, speak across oceans, talk from their moving cars to others on airplanes, survive birth weights of under two pounds, live with animal organs, view films with impossible feats, walk the same day as surgery, and struggle to know what is real and what to believe. We have gone beyond belief. If the media reports that we can go to mars, why would it not be possible to live the experience of another? If we can hurtle across the sky in an aluminum tube to arrive for the birth of a child in a hot, arid desert and then shuttle back to dinner in frosty Minnesota, then why not have bodies that can live forever? Why not have new organs to trade in like we do our tires that wear out? Why not morph like a character out of a terminator movie? The rate of change and the seemingly infinite possibilities promised by technology make us think that anything is possible and solvable. Simultaneously, our rational selves know that there are boundaries, and error and unanticipated events that circumscribe what is real and true. We know that past projections of the future were not born out. We do not visit the moon for vacation as was projected; we have not cured heart disease. We also know that we need to adopt a prospective, systematic approach to the evaluation of human impacts. If indeed transformation of unforeseen speed and intensity is upon us, then we need to act to assure that the needs and interests of people are considered in the design and development of new inventions and we must carve out the needed role for social and behavioral scientists, and legal ethicists, before we face the next techno-wave of problems in the courtroom and community.