The Future Of Public Administration:

21 Pages 5186 Words

lap required several air conditioned rooms. If we merely extrapolate that same progress in terms of size and computing capacity, twenty five years from now we might expect computers the size of a wrist watch, the size of a small coin that you could carry in your pocket, or a the size of a microscopic chip that could be implanted in your head.

Think what capacities and resources for knowledge and information such a computer would allow. And if in turn you think of linking that same computer to a similarly enhanced "Internet", imagine what possibilities there might be for instantaneous interpersonal and international communications.
We will in any case have to accommodate ourselves and our institutions to dramatically different bodies of knowledge and technological innovations.

A related point is that we will not only have to cope with and employ our expanded knowledge and technological capacity, we will have to learn to use this knowledge and technological capacity for the benefit rather than the destruction of society. In the technological world of the future, there will be even greater temptations for us to be captured by technology, to fall prey to what Jacques Ellul called the "technological imperative," and to allow rational technical interests to supercede human concerns and those of values. For those in the public service, finding ways of employing advanced technologies so as to enhance rather than restrict our capacity for leadership, creativity, and personal responsibility will be a serious challenge. And that leads to a second trend.

2. Changing institutional patterns resulting from the emergence of post-industrial economies and structures of governance based on information, knowledge, and services. In the future, even more than today, knowledge and information will prevail. And if knowledge is power, then those who have knowledge will indeed have power. But who will have knowledge? We can imagine two possible scenar...