

What Major Ethical Challenges Will We Face in the next 100 Years Because of Tech? - tsally

Disclosure: This is mostly for my own intellectual curiosity, but I also intend to write a series of essays on the subject.<p>I personally am worried about privacy and security in the cloud.  What do you feel will be a major issue we will have in face in the future because of changing technology?
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habs
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any
given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever
they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in
the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized."

-1984

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ars
Here's some stuff that would cause a problem is they happened, but that I
don't think will happen:

    
    
      Mind body transfer
      People living forever
      Artificial wombs
    

Here's some that might happen:

    
    
      Prenatal genetic selection, or alteration
      Human cloning
      Very expensive treatments that can not be afforded by many
      Having children very late in life (i.e. within
      a decade or two of expected death)
    

I don't know if it's possible to get it, but try to watch the show Century
City, or at least read episode synopses. Your question is the premise of the
show.

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markessien
People living for a very long time could happen, but I doubt that the
technology would be released to anyone who could not afford a few millions. No
matter how cheap, whoever owns the tech can charge what they want for it, and
people will pay tens of millions for it. It's better to concentrate on the
high end market, than to go for the low end.

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garrydanger
Ever since I first watched "ghost in the shell" years ago I've been a bit
scared of a time when we will be able to plug our brain into a computer
network... with the risk of getting it hacked.

I mean, you could always refuse to jack yourself in but I doubt I could.

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justindz
The basic rule of thumb on predicting future tech progress: figure out a
conservative estimate of how long until the tech comes about/matures and then
triple that number.

I think two major issues will be genetic discrimination, which seems like it's
on the verge of being an active issue, and whether we should begin restricting
access to some scientific information such as sequences or viral patterns in
the interest of security over freedom.

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scott_s
We can take some stabs at it now - privacy, genetic engineering - but I submit
we have no idea what the real problems will be. It's the revolutionary
technologies that matter, and by definition, you can't predict those.

Look at it from 1908. Think of what someone back then would have had to
predict in order to guess what technology related ethical dilemmas we face
now.

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noodle
100 years?

redefinition of intelligence and potentially life.

/yep, optimistic

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cousin_it
We likely can't predict tech for 100 years with any kind of detail. I think
tech will be pretty okay, but ideologies will give us major problems, as
always.

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rms
_Genetic engineering!!!!!!!!!!!!_

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flashgordon
this is scary... does this mean that (given that technology) the rich and
powerful will control the laws and essentially reap the benefits in
uncontrolled ways?

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paraschopra
Will we see next 100 years? I doubt that. Probably we would have erased
ourselves by then.

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ars
Why do you think that? Even a full scale nuclear war would not erase all of
humanity, and compared of the past right now is the least likely of all time
periods for major disasters like that to happen.

I can't think of anything that could happen right now that would wipe out all
of humanity. Even a massive asteroid wouldn't.

(Note: I mean _all_, lots of disasters could of course affect many people in
various places.)

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jumper
What makes you so certain that humanity won't be wiped out by a full nuclear
war or a massive asteroid impact?

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ars
I don't think you realize just how big the earth it.

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maurycy
Privacy: leaks of logs, archived Facebook profiles etc.

