Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance
TL;DR — The NSF’s 2002 ‘NBIC’ report — nano, bio, info and cognitive science converging to enhance humans. The founding document of a policy vocabulary.
NSF/DOC-sponsored report, June 2002, 482 pages. Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science — the NBIC convergence thesis.
The argument is that these four fields are merging at the nanoscale and that the merger makes deliberate human enhancement a near-term engineering programme rather than speculation. It was written as a research-agenda document and it succeeded in that: it created a funding vocabulary that shaped a decade.
Worth reading as an artifact of institutional futurism — what a national science agency thought the 2020s would contain, stated in 2002, and checkable now.
Where this came from
482 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.