We will examine developing areas of basic and applied science, the process of discovering science and technologies, as well as what makes science 'responsible' or 'irresponsible'; we will look at how science is distributed and how technologies are deployed and adopted.

We will look at scarce physical resources – water, oil minerals – and how their scarcity impacts social and political development; we will look at a clean environment as a natural resource and how degradation of the environment can be controlled and reversed and how it impacts people's lives, economies and the world order.

The ideas that have given us two centuries of scientific and technological development are coming increasingly under threat. We will look at the importance of the Enlightenment and enlightened thinking in the modern world, how to perpetuate it and how to further it over time. We will look at how economics can and should adapt to threats from, well, reality and how to promote rational understanding of our changing and uncertain world.

For the first time in generations, income inequality is growing in the Western world and between the developed and developing worlds. We will question policies and assumptions about merit, equity and inequality, merit goods – health and education, the impact of aging populations, distributions of wealth, the role of families and people's behaviour as they are impacted by changing technologies.

In the technological era, nowhere has there been more change – both technological and social – than in communication and information sharing; these give us a window in to how technologies will impact our worlds and how people will react to changing technologies – who adopts, who adapts and does not and how. We will look at arts and media and the impact of remote and distributed consumption of information.

The growth of government as an organising force has been one of the most compelling aspects of the industrial era. What will be the effect of changing communication and information technologies on participatory democracy and on the role of government? How can and should governments adapt to changing technologies in the delivery of services and how will technologies change what citizens demand and what governments should deliver and how they deliver them?

Changing technologies will change what markets and firms do and how they do it; they will change the nature of work, the timing and location of work and what working means personally and socially; they will change what it means to own something and the relationship between ownership and control; they will change who pays attention to firms, how and what they expect of firms and markets as a result. Regulation will need to adapt to new risks and more complex risks associated with interconnectedness and interdependence.

The collapse of the Soviet Union – and the break-down of a bi-polar, post-war world order – was in part a consequence of accelerating production and consumption technologies and the inefficacy of centralised control. What will the new world order look like as institutions developed for the industrial age struggle to cope with the demands of a networked, interconnected world in which national borders are, increasingly, inconsequential? Threats to security will be defined differently and response capabilities will need to adapt to new realities and a broader range of contingencies. The national interest will look and feel different; competing interests will be resolved differently.