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

10 points by tsally ↗ HN
Disclosure: This is mostly for my own intellectual curiosity, but I also intend to write a series of essays on the subject.

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?

17 comments

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noodle
100 years?

redefinition of intelligence and potentially life.

/yep, optimistic

rms
Genetic engineering!!!!!!!!!!!!
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?
paraschopra
Will we see next 100 years? I doubt that. Probably we would have erased ourselves by then.
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.)

santacruz
tech will be erased certainly :)
jumper
What makes you so certain that humanity won't be wiped out by a full nuclear war or a massive asteroid impact?
ars
I don't think you realize just how big the earth it.
mattchew
A malevolent AI could pave the earth.

We might get a nanotech grey goo scenario, or just a sufficiently bad nanotech disaster to kill off higher life forms.

Plausibly, the parent post meant erase modern civilization rather than every last homo sapiens. Full scale nuclear war could do that. So could an an engineered superflu. Both are a lot more likely than an asteroid strike.

If we can last until we get off the planet, our long term prospects are a lot brighter.

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

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

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.

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.