The September/October 2004 issue of Foreign Policy is a special issue focused on “The World’s most Dangerous Ideas”. Foreign Policy describes this issue as follows:

“Ideas matter, and sometimes they can be dangerous.

With this simple conviction, FOREIGN POLICY asked eight leading thinkers to issue an early warning on the ideas that will be most destructive in the coming years. A few of these ideas have long and sometimes bloody pedigrees. Others are embryonic, nourished by breakthroughs in science and technology. Several are policy ideas whose reverberations are already felt; others are more abstract, but just as pernicious. Yet, as the essays make clear, these dangerous ideas share a vulnerability to insightful critique and open debate.”

Two of the eight articles, by Robert Wright and Fareed Zakaria, are available without a subscription.

A question follows from Foreign Policy’s exercise: How does the knowledge represented in the “dangerous ideas” compare to how we organize ourselves to produce and deal with knowledge? One answer to this question is that there is a considerable mismatch between how we organize the knowledge enterprise and how we organize ourselves to deal with the consequences of knowledge.

Aspects of this problem are discussed by Lightman et al. in their volume “Living with the Genie: Essays on Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery” published by Island Press.