I know I am acting as a one-note musician of late, so feel free to skip this if you've heard it (from me) before but this is not just the shape things to come, it is one example of a force which will dictate every aspect of your life, every aspect of how governments are (re)structured, every one of our childrens' lives will be grounded in and determined in large part by this force. The force is simply the fact that technology is rapidly bestowing the power to cause very great destruction to very large number of people into the hands of smaller and smaller groups of people, tending towards one. In fact the level of destruction is tending towards "death" and the number of victims is tending towards "everyone". That is a world changing event sneaking up on us and no one is taking it all that seriously, at least, no one I have granola and lattes with.
It's not just genetics, it's all forms of DIYBio and eventually nanotechnology; it makes viruses ransomware and even city-closing SCADA attacks look like the good old days. If what happened in cyber happens in the real world it will look like this: hackers will toy with genetics and bio-based "stuff" under the hacker ethos of free exploration for everyone. Most of it will just come to nothing, but someone will find a way to turn all the algae in public fountains neon blue and everyone will think it's cool. Then the blackhats will start to get involved and create malicious wetware. Then the DIYBio hackers will try to step in and write wetware to protect us against wetware. We know where this goes. We know who has the upper hand and who is always playing catch-up in this cat and mouse game.
The problem, the real problem is we're a failed species. Because of the way we evolved, owing to evolutionary pressures where winning is strictly defined as making babies (DNA passing itself on through the device of making brains and bodies that want to pass it on.. any other type of DNA eventually gets shut out of existence), very many people are completely governed by genetically mediated impulses which serve fish, lions and apes well enough but spell doom for humans. Those impulses just keep driving people to *more* of certain behaviors, without limit. More money, more power, more land, more resources, more control over other people and what they do and think and of course who they fuck (religious zealots) . It's all about gathering to yourself and monopolizing as much as possible all money and power and therefore, women and thereby offspring. You have countless examples of exactly this behavior in medieval times where the local Lord would avail himself of any peasant bride the night before she was married or in with polygamous cultures like modern day Saudi Arabia or just being a NBA star or a corporate executive or a rock star.. it's the drive to control resources and be the alpha male in order to maximize your genetic fitness, and of course, it has to be pointed out that women overwhelming prefer such males.
Those are extreme examples all, but they go to the heart to of the issue with our species- it's why there's social inequities at all. It's why there's war and totalitarian dictatorships and income inequities and why a small group of people will band together to fuck over millions and billions of other people just to preserve their privileged status. It's about status which is about controlling resources which is about copulation and genetic success whether the bearers of those impulses are aware of it or not.
We *could* be a species whose members, as soon as they are assured they will always have enough immediately and determinedly set about to provide and lift up their fellow humans. We *could* be a species whose strongest desire is to make sure everyone in our community has the basics necessary for a decent living. Are we that species? Have you ever wondered why not? Why do billionaires offshore their wealth to tax havens and give less of their net income to charity than "average" people? Why do dictators dictate anything other than fairness and economic equity shall be the law of their land? Why are the strongest human drives to acquire control dominate exclude and generally fuck over people far less fortunate than themselves ?
From a sociobiological perspective, all those drives serve one purpose- to advance the "cause" of your genes, to increase your personal reproductive fitness at the expense of your alleged competitors who are vying for the same reproductive-enhancing resources and opportunities.
And in fact, control over and access to all that stuff DID, over the course of evolutionary time, prove to be the deciding factors in who lived long enough to spread their genes and who was genetically shut out. As a consequence, we are all to a greater or lesser extent possessors of those impulses. And for some people, or for all people in some environments, those drives just never experience any type of satiety or attenuation by other life events. They brutally and callously determine their bearers' behaviors and dominate their world view, forever without limit and without end.
So bin Laden, who had many wives, and many children and tons of money STILL felt insulted, dismissed and humiliated when his offer to defend Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein was rebuffed by the Saudi royal family and the rest is history. So Saddam Hussein who had effective control over the land wealth and political power of an entire sovereign state only used it to aggrandize himself and seek yet more power. So John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Bill Gates - who are known now by many for their charitable trusts- had lives and careers that can only be described as pure-play sociopathic; their productive lives were spent dominating, and deceiving industries and customers, in that order, all in (blind, unconscious) service to increasing their "genetic fitness" which , darn it can never be fit enough.
Look at what ISIS is promising its recruits- harems, women and power over other men. Look at what they told the 9-11 hijackers.. 19 virgins in heaven. Sure the promises of enhancing their reproductive fitness are sublimated with some Allah-talk and jihadi-righteousness and Caliphate-goodness, but that's all it is, sublimation. Is that really any different than libertarians and conservatives talking about lowering taxes and getting government off their backs so they can just have more, er I mean benefit society in their capacity as job creators ? They're all just justifying their acquisitive impulses and those impulses exist as they do as a mere tool for their DNA, so that is can succeed, so it can be more competitive in a competitive environment.
We are the things our genes make us and at a very fundamental level, we do their bidding . It's why you're sexual at all and what part of your daily activity and waking hours are spent thinking about, looking for, preparing in some way for sex. Attracting a mate. Planning a successful career. It's so basic, we don't want to own it, we don't want to admit the extent to which our DNA uses us and our thoughts and impulses and ambitions and perceptions and opinions to serve as a vehicle to recreate itself. And all that comes out at the dysfunctional end as terrorism, as a desire to destroy the competing males and the society they built and the leverage that society gives them.
We have to set about the work of making ourselves a different version of ourselves. We hail Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and virtually just anyone who succeeds materially, but in reality these are the worst sorts of people. We have this vague or sometimes explicit idea that we can contain and channel otherwise destructive "ambition" (to use a disarming phrase for domination and destruction of others) to society's benefit. That belief has to be measured by its results and what are those results exactly? Well, where are we right now? What is the original article talking about, because that's where we are, really, at a juncture where another 50 years will finish us as a species. We need to turn our technology on ourselves and make a better version of ourselves and by better I don't mean smarter, taller, better looking, more cunning, more "successful", I mean better, morally and socially better.
Either we can use our technology to fix the actual problem we have, or we can use our technology to make better band-aids for the increasingly vicious wounds that same technology will be inflicting on us. Only one of those paths has a future for us.