Redesigning the future of the technosphere

The future of the Earth is increasingly wrapped up in the design and operation of the technosphere: the aggregate technological apparatus and systems built to provide infrastructural support for human societies and the global economy. This relationship between people, technologies, and the biosphere defines the Anthropocene, the period in which human technological capabilities have become global in scale and ambition and planetary in significance and impact. Responsible innovation is thus no longer limited to ethical assessment of the manufacturing or use of individual technologies as tools. It now extends to the ways in which new technologies reconfigure and transform the socio-technological systems that comprise the technosphere, their interactions with Earth systems, the technological and environmental habitats they create for humans and the Earth's other inhabitants, and what it means to live and to experience life in those habitats. This article proposes, therefore, systematic efforts to better come to grips with the global socio-technological systems humanity is now designing, fashioning, and operating and the larger planetary techno-human enterprise - the technosphere - that they add up to. Finding ways to make technospheric systems more visible and analytically tractable is increasingly critical to long-term planetary sustainability and human flourishing, as are understanding, analyzing, and modeling their human and technological structures and dynamics, critically evaluating their implications for what it means to be human and for the Anthropocene Earth; and intentionally designing and redesigning their futures.