The dangerous question

Up at the Edge, John Brockman is creating a custom of asking a "question of the year" to a bunch of smart people. Last year, it was about "What we believe but cannot prove", and the assembled and edited answers recently came out as a book. This year's question is: "What is your dangerous idea?". 117 people contributed an answer. I checked some of my favorite thinkers (several of them spoke at my conference TEDGLOBAL last July):

Astronomer Sir Martin Rees: Science may be running out of control.
Geneticist Craig Venter: Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create social conflicts.
Physicist Paul Davies: The fight against global warming is lost.
Phychologist Phil Zimbardo: The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism.
Author Michael Schermer: Where goods cross frontiers, armies won't.
Socialtech researcher Clay Shirky: Free will is going away: time to redesign society to take that into account.
Biologist Lynn Margulis: Bacteria are us.
Author Doug Rushkoff: Open-source currency.
Psychologist Irene Pepperberg: The difference between humans and non-humans is quantitative, not qualitative.

  And historian James O'Donnell, whom I'd never heard of before, has this one:

Marx was right: the "State" will evaporate and cease to have useful meaning as a form of human organization.

I'm fascinated by Brockman's approach of asking a wide-open but provocative question to a very diverse set of smart people and see what comes back. I think I will one day "localize" the idea and ask some questions around Switzerland or Europe.