What will tomorrow be like? By our nature, all of us are inquisitive. Indeed, our desire to look ahead may be a genetic survival trait. The exercise of foresight affords early warning of disaster, or it may reveal doors of opportunity. Toying with the future, however, carries seeds of frustration. The future is unknown and even unknowable. Thus, the only certainty about the future is its uncertainty.

Indeed, by reading the past, we should expect the future to be entangled with surprises, contradictions, discontinuities, joys and disappointments.

Every society, every culture, contains individuals who establish their identity by claiming a capacity to see the future. Many prey on superstitions and on those who feel vulnerable to a loss in control of their lives. They need whatever handholds are offered by soothsayers, fortune tellers, astrologers and magicians. For millennia, dreams have been interpreted as windows on the future. Even the Hebrew Bible relates how a prophet translated a pharaoh's dream as a forecast of feast and famine that led to survival strategies of storing grain.

If these practices seem archaic, note that more newspapers than ever publish horoscopes, and that Nancy Reagan sought advice from an astrologer to supplement her husband's advisors in policy making. Investors constantly make decisions based on their view of the future. So do individuals when they purchase insurance, hedging on possibilities and probabilities that are inimical to a person's fortune.

Leafing through human history, it is likely that the concept of "future" was associated with the transition of human tribes from hunter-gatherers to farmers. To plant one season and harvest later required looking ahead, and those who did so were generally rewarded by successful crops. Soon after, social organization matured with sharp attention to ownership of agricultural land. A power structure followed, with the result that except for the elite landowners, peasants had little control over their lives and destiny. Choices regarding the future were moot. For most of human history, that was the condition of domination and servitude in almost every ethnic group

In the last few centuries that has changed sharply. Now, every individual ponders their future and that of family, in terms of futures they want or don't want. In an atmosphere of freedom and opportunity, each individual carries a different vision of the future in their head. The notion that people could create their future by education, by diligence, by collective action is a very recent evolution that was nourished by the concept of democracy, with liberty and justice for all.

At the turn of the millennium, this trajectory has hit a speed bump. The high-tech culture in America seems unwittingly to neglect the future. Lulled by technology's gifts, Americans favor instant gratification and ignore future consequences of current choice. Thus, pathologies of the short run are driven by the reward structure in business where long term performance may be sacrificed to boost Monday morning stock quotations or quarterly earnings. Politics responds to the imperatives of instant polls, and leadership lacks courage to go public with the tradeoffs between the short and long term benefits. Individual investors expect high-tech stocks to continue upward spirals, indefinitely.

In short, our society has developed a temporal provincialism where people are preoccupied with immediate events presented as "breaking news," indifferent to the bigger issues.

Such behavior stems from beliefs that the system has grown beyond human control, or at least control beyond that of a narrow elite. Such pernicious attitudes can undermine democracy, in fostering apathy, cynicism, and loss in elan. Operationally, there are two almost opposite consequences. In one case, loss in attention to the future weakens sharpness of purpose, what America is all about. In the other, there is loss of vigilance by looking ahead to expose possibly adverse consequences followed by action to prevent or at least mitigate harm.

Neither situation presumes knowledge of the future. One case is based on hopes and dreams, in the case of America as engraved by the Constitution. The other case reflects the reality that all decisions have consequences. In weighing alternatives, it is crucial to ask, "what might happen, if," or "what might happen, unless," followed by the questions, "to whom," and "when."

This process of analysis can prompt melancholy when side effects are itemized and juxtaposed against intended benefits. Most of these second order effects usually turn out to be negative. On the other hand, this is the process by which society and its leaders create the future, to generate the futures preferred and steer away from those estimated as harmful.

The Double Helix is about the future, not a forecast but an analysis of critical trends and where they are likely to lead. Some things we see ahead are sure to please. Some are cause for alarm. Many things we cannot see. Of central concern, however, are threats to freedom and its guarantees through a Constitutional democracy. On the premise that technology will increasingly rule people's lives, in the U.S. and everywhere on the planet, every technology needs to be sensitively steered to protect that which we collectively hold most dear. In the book, these are the strategies for survival.

The Double Helix asks whether the American society has the capacity, the perspicacity and the will to assure continuity in the one maxim we presume gains universal defense, "liberty and justice for all." Both can be threatened by unintended consequences, especially of information technology. Hard edged and hard wired innovations spin benefits, but side effects stretch risk horizons beyond the potential of any technological fix.

People are faced with changes in the way they live, they way they think and the way they act. It takes a profound act of faith to assert that the future is a matter of choice and not chance. These choices are not primarily among technologies. They are moral choices. They cannot be informed only by market place economics and public policy. People must decide, for example, on how safe is safe, a social judgment for what degree of risk is tolerable, and with what equality in its burden, who wins and who loses.

How indeed, do we decide? There is one simple answer, to inquire with each technological initiative as to the impact on the people who will live in that future, our children. Indeed, how a society values its children can be considered a litmus test for civilization. The Constitution clearly states that the blessings of liberty are to be preserved for our progeny.

The future may be unknown and unknowable, but a failure to look ahead may underscore the Biblical injunction that, "without vision, the people perish."

The Double Helix: Technology and Democracy in the American Future treats five institutional sectors and for each sets forth prescriptions of social responsibility. These encompass government and its self governing electorate, business, the media, universities and religious institutions. The latter play a unique role on the premise that the most salient social choices are based on moral vision.