Converging Technologies: The Future of the Global Information Society

First Committee Chair briefing prepared by Christopher Altman as UNISCA Chairman of the First Committee on Disarmament and International Security.

This 2002 policy briefing examines the national and international security implications of convergence among information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and related fields. Prepared for the UNISCA First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, it argues that increasingly ubiquitous and interdependent information infrastructures will expand information warfare beyond attacks on computers and communications into threats capable of producing significant physical, economic, and biological consequences.

The report was subsequently selected for the 2004 RSA Information Security Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Policy. This repository record preserves an archival copy of the original report. The PDF includes later front matter recording the 2004 RSA award; that material does not alter the report’s original 2002 publication date.

The report situates these developments within the transition to a global information society and considers critical-infrastructure vulnerability, technological inequality, borderless conflict, and the changing relationship between human and machine systems. It applies concepts from complex-systems theory—including scale-free networks, phase-space reconstruction, feedback control, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and artificial immune systems—to problems of adaptive cyber defence and strategic planning. It concludes that managing the security consequences of technological convergence requires anticipatory governance, international cooperation, multidisciplinary analysis, and sustained attention to the ethical consequences of increasingly intelligent and biologically integrated technologies.