Humanizing the future: managing change with soft technology

Technology has always inspired social change, but its scale and complexity have begun to bewilder even the politicians and policymakers. Several recent national foresight studies point to a need for socio‐organizational or “soft” technologies to help Europe manage change and respond to major new economic opportunities. Research is required in fields such as neuro‐linguistic programming, the psychology of knowledge management and the ergonomics of the man‐machine interface. “Electronic pets” showed that we can learn to love machines – now the challenge is to embed technology in such a way as to marry science with society.