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Of course, below are only guesses of which could be the possible directions in which the subject may evolve. Some of the ideas may looks strange, but they have an illustrative purpose of the potentialities of the approach (see also [30-32]).

Identifying and Manipulating the 'Atoms' of Life

The situation in molecular biology, genetics and proteonics today resembles the situation of Zoology before Darwin and of Chemistry before the periodic table: 'everything' is known (at least all the human genes), some regularity rules are recognized, but the field lacks an unifying dynamical principle. In particular the dynamics of 'folding' (the process that gives the proteins their shape given a certain base sequence) and the relation between each protein shape and its function are anybody's guess.

In principle it is arguable that these problems can be solved within the borders of the present techniques and concepts (with some addition of data mining and informatics). However, I would bet rather on the emergence of new concepts, in terms of which this 'total mess' would become 'as simple' as predicting the chemical properties of elements in terms of the occupancy of their electronic orbitals. So the problem is: what are the 'true' relevant degrees of freedom in protein/ genes dynamics? Single bases / nucleic acids are 'too small'; alpha chains or beta sheets - too big.

Of course answering this problem will transform the design of new medicines into a systematic search rather than the random walk that is today.

Interactive Markets Forecast and Regulation

Understanding and regulating the dynamics of the (financial) markets is in some ways similar to predicting and monitoring weather or road traffic, and at least as important: One cannot predict individual car accidents but one can predict based on the present data the probable behavior of the system as a whole. Such prediction ability allows the optimization of system design as well as on-line intervention to avert unwanted disturbances etc. Moreover one can estimate the effect of unpredictable events and prepare the reaction to them.

It is certainly a matter of top priority that the public and the authorities in charge of economic stability will have at their disposal standard reliable tools of monitoring, analysis and intervention.

In the past it was assumed that the market dynamics is driven by exogenous factors and/or by uncontrollable psychological factors and/or by purely random fluctuations. This discouraged the study of their endogenous dynamics in a systematic quantitative realistic way. Other difficulties were the lack of knowledge on the numerical stability properties of the problem and on the nature of the relevant data necessary to describe the dynamics realistically. To make the things worse, until a few years ago, much of the trading data was also not available (especially in as far as the identity of the traders performing various successive transactions).

In the last years progress was obtained in all the issues above and the main difficulty that remains is at the cultural human level: the successful study of the stock market dynamics requires the synthesis of knowledge and techniques from different domains: financial economics, psychology, sociology, physics and computer science. These fields have very different 'cultures': different objectives, criteria of success, techniques and language. Bringing people from these disciplines together is not enough - a deep shift in their way of thinking is necessary.

Usually this requires 'growing' a new generation of 'bilingual' young scientists that produce the synthesis in their own minds. Otherwise, even the most efficient software platform will just be reduced to a very expensive and cumbersome gadget.

Horizontal Interaction Protocols and Self-Organized Societies

The old world was divided in distinct organizations: some small (a bakery, a shoe store) and some large (a state administration, an army) [33].

The way to keep it working was for the big ones to have a very strict hierarchical chain of command and for the small ones (which couldn't support a hierarchy) to keep everybody in close 'horizontal' personal contact. With the emergence of the third sector (public non-profit organizations), with the emergence of fast developing specialized activities, with the very lively ad-hoc merging and splitting of organizations, the need for lateral (non-hierarchical) communication in large organizations has increased. Yet, as opposed to the hierarchical organization, nobody knows how to make and keep under control a non-hierarchical organization. The hope is that some local protocols acting at the 'local' level may lead to the emergence of some global 'self-organizing' order. The study and simulation of such systems might lead to the identification of modern ' Hammurapi codes of laws' which to regulate (and defend) the new 'distributed' society.

Mechanical Soul (re-)Search

The internal structure of psyche came under scientific scrutiny with the work of Freud. Yet to this very day there is no consensus of its nature. Even worse: most of the professionals in this field have resisted any use of the significant new tools that appeared in the intervening 100 years. This is likely to be a great loss as even the simplest computer experiments lead often to very unexpected and clue letting results. The old Turing test measuring the computer against the humans may be now left behind for a more lateral approach: not 'who is better', but 'how do they differ?', 'can human thought learn from mechanical procedures?' This may help humans to transcend the human condition by identifying and shading away self-casted limits to ones selves.

Example of specific projects:

• Invention machines: programs that generate 'creative' ideas.
• Predicting / Influencing the emergence of new political/ moral /social / artistic ideas out of the old ones.
• Identifying the structure of meaningful / interesting stories / communication.
• Understanding and influencing sentiment dynamics: Protocols for education towards positive feelings.
• Automatic family counselor: Inventing procedures, 'rites' for solving personal / family problems.
• Automatic art counselor: Documenting, analyzing and reproducing ideas dynamics and personal development in drawings (small children, Picasso drawing suites)
• Pedagogical aids: Understanding and exploiting the interplay between ideas expressed in words and their internal (pictorial) representation.

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