SEARCHING THE RIGHT TRACKS OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN THE EARTH RACE FOR A BALANCE BETWEEN PROGRESS AND SURVIVAL

The paper presents an analysis of the actual World major challenges, which could require priority technological solutions from the information and communications technologies (ICT) field, but not exclusively from this area. The main point of the paper is to emphasize the importance, for the actual information society (IS) and for the following Knowledge Based Society (KBS), of perceiving the gravity of these challenges, which appear as a companion of the general race for progress, as they put in danger the Earth civilization in a progressive way and as a consequence, of using the huge potential of ICT and complementary technologies to overcome as much as possible this trend and generate this way an other kind of race, for survival solutions. As concrete solutions, the paper identifies some of the main ICT areas which could contribute to solve critical problems as climate changes (CO2 generation), over-population and Earth resources (food, water, minerals etc.) fading, but including also internal progress risks (as nuclear incidents like Fukushima) or external credible menaces, as sun storms. A remarkable example is given by the biggest project, ever made, of using ICT in order to organize, from the identity point of view, a huge number of individuals, accounting about 1 billion at the end of 2011, in India. The paper concludes that the analyzed issues have a common point, in the World progressive dependence on electricity and soon of ICT products and services, which must lead to a mature control of this dependence.