Posing a normative question about whether humans 'should' do these things or not, is the wrong question. Considering there won't be any 100% effective means to bar everyone from accessing them—the wealthy & powerful will always find a way around the laws, etc. And no one wants that kind of inequity.
Hi†lerian eugenics is disanalogous as that was little more than a state-imposed breeding/culling program with involuntary participation from the populace. Whereas a 'market eugenics' program would be entirely voluntary with people free to choose whatever, if any, genomic/cybernetic modifications they wanted, and nobody being arbitrarily terminated by fiat.
Sure, but the problems humans were facing before said technologies were arguably much bigger/deadlier. E.g., the Industrial Revolution wasn't always pretty, but neither was epidemic disease, mass child mortality, and the sort of listless grinding poverty afflicting most everyone prior to the ~1750s.Tampering with the genetic code or transplanting the human mind into a electronic vehicle is not something I consider doing lightly. Man is infected with a sort of hubris. He thinks that he can easily outsmart nature, but nature's systems of checks and balances often throw his "progress" right back in his face (The pill allowed for free love, then the AIDS crisis, man conquered the space vacuum, then Apollo 13, cities which run on oil are utopias which provide refuge from nature...which are quickly running out of resources and are destroying the ozone which keeps us all alive...and on and on and on.
Unintended consequences are real and should be taken seriously. But that shouldn't deter us from attempting to solve immediate problems.
Agree. The saga of human existence has basically been a Promethean one of overcoming 'nature' and all its hereditary/environmental limitations. No reason that shouldn't continue.That's not to say I would begrudge them for trying. Fuck nature, she's a bitch. Hell yes we should at least make a sporting go of trying to subjugate her.
Apocalyptic doomsaying may seem exciting, but is patently unrealistic from my POV. I don't know that there's historically been a single instance of rapid 'total civilizational collapse'—e.g. the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire might appear that way in hindsight, but was actually a process spanning over multiple centuries. And the subsequent 'Dark Ages' weren't so dark, as the livelihoods for many in the region improved substantially; the end of Roman hegemony was more a relief than a tragedy.From my viewpoint, I think the current global hegemony will collapse. (Even if it's a "soft" collapse like what happened to the British Empire.) Civilizations seem to have an apoptosis just like germs and men. Not even Rome lived forever. After that, I'm not sure where will be technologically, but with fundamental Islam conquering the globe, and with ego effacing mandated by the still traditionally Confucian influenced emerging superpower China, it may well be another Dark Ages. To use some of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's terms, I think the TV, the automobile, and the A/C are robust enough to stick around, but maybe not things so ornate and fragile as the smartphone and the personal laptop. To be honest, I'm hedging my bets that we will destroy the planet from either overpopulation, atmosphere destruction or nuclear fallout before we get android bodies or escape to the stars...but this is all just speculation, of course.



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