Nanotechnology: incredible products predicted for the future

April 10 2008 / by futuretalk / by Dick Pelletier

The late Arthur C. Clarke once said, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is virtually indistinguishable from magic.’ Enter humanity’s newest plunge into magic nanotechnology.

Imagine a world with billions of desktop-size machines that can create almost anything - clothing, furniture, electronics, and more - in just minutes. Today, such devices are not available, but one day soon, a small nano-factory will sit on your kitchen counter and let you order nearly anything you desire at little or no cost.

Computer, make me ham and eggs, home fries, wheat toast, and coffee. Although this may sound like something out of Star Trek, according to futurist Ray Kurzweil, nano-factories could be providing you and your family with meals, medicines, and most essentials by as early as mid-2020s.

Nano-factories operate similar to the way life creates its miracles. A plant grabs atoms from dirt, water, and air, and transforms them into a juicy red strawberry. Our bodies rearrange atoms in the food we eat to create new blood cells. And in similar fashion, nano-factories collect raw atoms from something as inexpensive as dirt, air, or seawater and produce clothes, food, medicine, or even another nano-factory.

A recent government report, “Nanotechnology: the Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think” outlined when we can expect nano-products to enter the consumer market:

2000-2005 - mostly passive nano items were developed during this period, including sunscreens, tennis rackets, stain/water-resistant clothing, and other high-tech products.

2005-2010 - active products that change states during use are typical for this group. These include materials that sense when a product is strained, such as cars that automatically repair dents; wiper-less windshield cleaners; materials that convert sunlight into electricity to power personal electronics; clothing that changes color and texture on command; and nanofoods such as fat-free donuts, cholesterol-lowering Read more

Think 10X, Not 10%

By Jack Uldrich

April 21 2008 - Cross-posted from www.jumpthecurve.net

One of my favorite quotes comes from Kurt Yeager who once said: “In periods of profound change the most dangerous thing is to incrementalize yourself into the future.” I was reminded of this quote because although I often speak to businesses about the future of technology, I frequently encounter push back from executives who are mostly interested in identifying ways to incrementally improve their businesses or products. In short, they are looking for improvements in the range of 10%.

I constantly remind them, however, that we are no longer living in an era of linear growth - a 10% improvement might have been sufficient to keep them competitive in the past, but it is no strategy if they desire to be in business in 10 years. To achieve that goal, they must be on the lookout for how 10X improvements will transform their business. (Ray Kurzweil, in this excellent editorial , also emphasizes this point.)

To this end, I recently came across a couple of articles that highlight this point. The first addresses how a number of researchers are looking to increase data storage by a factor of a hundred. It is difficult to contemplate how a 100X improvement in data storage might transform education, media, advertising and even health care, but it is imperative that professionals in these fields start thinking along these lines immediately.

Here’s why: according to this recent Technology Review article, a new type of memory technology that uses 99% less energy could be on the market within 18 months. In other words, in the near future not only will your iPod or cellphone be able to hold 100X data (perhaps all of your genetic data), it will also be able to operate using only one one-hundredth of the battery power of your existing device.

Data storage, of course, is just one field experiencing exponential growth - semiconductors, Internet Bandwidth, genomics, robotics, RFID technology, nanotechnology, and even brain scanning technology are all doing the same. With regard to the latter, late last year reseachers at Harvard University announced that they could illuminate brain neurons with 100 different colors a 20X improvement.

Now, you might not think that brain scanning technology will impact your business that much, but I would encourage you to think otherwise. As researchers learn more about how the brain operates you can expect these professionals to also develop new strategies for learning; to create more effective marketing and advertising campaigns; and even to optimize strategies for bolstering people’s decision-makings processes. Bottom-line: If you are just focused on a 10% improvement, you are already behind the curve. You need to learn to ‘jump the curve’ because the future belongs to those people who can think 10X or more.

Related Articles:
Android
Improving innovation

Building A Faster Internet

 

By Karen Pinchin | NEWSWEEK Apr, 2008 Issue

A conductor in Tokyo moves his baton, and an orchestra in Cleveland starts to play. A few bars later, a violinist in Berlin joins in. To compensate for a slight delay, the musicians play along with an electronic metronome. The performance is broadcast on high-fidelity speakers and high-definition television. Such a musical experiment would be challenging enough for a television network to pull off; over the Internet, it would be impossible.

That may soon change. Engineers are developing a new type of Internet connection called a dynamic-circuit network that could carry so much data so quickly it might startle even Net surfers in Japan or South Korea. If all goes to plan, the vast data speeds required for such a collaboration may soon be available to all. That might go a long way to solving the problem of how to handle the enormous growth in Internet traffic, which by some estimates is doubling each year.

When a digital photo, YouTube clip or live streaming video is sent over the Internet, the data is Read more

Tomorrow’s Internet - holographic get-togethers and more

April 20 2008 / by futuretalk on Future Blogger at memebox.com

By Dick Pelletier

A new higher-speed Internet2, now under development in labs around the world, will one day offer holographic images indiscernible from reality, providing an array of applications that we can only dream of today.

With digital video resolution four times finer than today’s HDTV, and haptic technologies that provide a realistic sense of touch, researchers can create holograph images of people filmed thousands of miles away enabling lifelike virtual interaction indiscernible from reality. The system uses cameras that capture live images of people from two or more places, merges the data, and feeds it back to all locations.

We could organize a meeting with friends or relatives from cities scattered around the world without anyone actually traveling. People will kiss, hug and reminisce as if they were in the same room. And our senses will convince us that they are there. We could even meet with a simulation of a favorite celebrity. Read more

William McDonough Interview - Massive Change

William McDonough Interview. March 23, 2004 - four years old and very UltraFuture. From massivechange.com

You talk about the Next Industrial Revolution, where industry and environment come together in harmony. What does this look like?
It looks at the idea as Francis Crick said in 1962, that in order for something to be vital it has to have growth, it has to have a free form of energy, and it has to have an open system of chemicals. So if we think about a tree, it has to have some cells that grow, even for simple reproduction, and it has to have free energy from outside the system, in this case natural sunlight, and it needs an open system of chemicals that synthesize within its metabolism for the benefit of the organism, its reproduction, and its ecosystem.

If we saw human industry in a similar way we’d realize that there’s something relatively new in evolutionary terms that we call technical nutrition. Not just biological nutrition, which is the living thing powered by the sun and ‘consumed’ by other organisms as they breakdown (or, as we say, ‘waste equals food’), but actually seeing human artifice and technology as something that is put into the same kind of cycle. These are what we call technical nutrients. Take aluminum for example. Our species has made 680 million tons of aluminum since 1880 and we still know where 440 million tons are. So the idea would be that you would design two kinds of things, one is what we call ‘products of consumption’, those things that are literally biologically consumed and go back to soil, or ‘products of service’, things from which we want the service, but not necessarily the molecular potential. With something like a computer or a car or carpet, the user is a ‘customer’ not a ‘consumer’. These are services and in fact, when you finish with a synthetic carpet, for example, you should be able to either return it back to industry forever and remake carpets or other useful things. So biological and technical nutrition - that’s the protocol we initiated and have been continuously championing and developing.

What is the difference between eco-efficiency and what you call eco-effectiveness?
Eco-efficiency (doing more with less) as a strategy is well meaning but not necessarily adequate to the task. Being efficient means that you’re probably doing something right, in terms of using the least to do the most, but the problem is that if you’re doing the wrong thing, it might be pernicious because it perpetuates the wrong system with the erroneous thought that things are getting better. For someone to tell a company to be more eco-efficient and please make twice as many cardboard boxes out of the trees in Indonesia, sounds like a factor 2 efficiency. Even if they said make it factor 4 or factor 10, you still haven’t really solved the problem, because it’s still goodbye to Indonesian forests. Why would you use something as beautiful and as diverse as a tree for something as prosaic as a cardboard box that’s used once or even twice, and then put into a chlorine-laden ‘recycling’ loop that is actually continuously down-cycling all the materials and destroying water quality? From our design perspective, the question really needs to be, ‘With eco-efficiency, is being less bad being good, or is it simply being bad, just less so?’ With eco-effectiveness, on the other hand, we ask the question, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ And then we start to do it efficiently, so we can create prosperity and growth.

So we’re not interested in being less bad. We’re interested in being 100% good.
Right. That means you have to design with positive principles and positive goals. Modern industrial culture doesn’t seem to have principles, except something like: ‘If brute force isn’t working, you are not using enough of it.’ While its goals are unclear, its de facto goal appears to be to create ecological and human tragedy. If you play a game, you have to have a clear goal; in chess, you’re going to take a king. So we have an end game in mind because without this strategy becomes meaningless. What we seek is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean water, air, soil and power, that is economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed.

How did you get turned onto the idea of changing the world of design?
I grew up in Hong Kong, so I was in a place with four hours of water every fourth day during the dry season and six million people on forty square miles. I saw a lot of optimization of very precious resources. Then, as we went to the Pacific Northwest for the summers with my grandparents and saw astonishing abundance - fresh water, big forests, pure springs, salmon. I went from a world of extreme limits to a world of extreme abundance, and yet my grandparents were also very careful and kept the spring clean, composted organic waste, and saved rubber bands and aluminum foil and so on. So I always thought the world was something you took care of, and it hopefully got better because you were there. And I also saw in Chinese agriculture a perpetual agriculture: farmers for forty centuries farming the same piece of ground. So that was the context in which I grew up. When I came to the United States to live as a teenager, I entered a world of profligacy and seeming wanton abandon of things in a take-make-waste production system, with a cradle-to-grave ‘throw it away’ philosophy. I think this, in many ways, was the result of something I, personally, had not lived through - nuclear threat. While I was a child in Hong Kong, third graders in the U.S. were being taught how to dive under their desks because Armageddon may appear at any instant. When you sense that everything could end in an instant, you live as if there might not be a tomorrow. This became embedded in the culture - modern culture actually created geo-political and physical threats (global terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, biological warfare) that could destroy us all tomorrow - so many industrialized countries have a ‘get it while we can’ attitude rather than a continuous long-term prosperity in mind.

What goes on in a cradle-to-cradle cycle?
Cradle-to-cradle essentially says that you have an open metabolism of chemicals that are manifesting benefit for living systems or technical systems. They’re not contaminating each other and they are designed to either replace themselves in cycles or get better as they go through the system. Typically what we call recycling today is down-cycling in our lexicon. Things are actually getting lower in quality as they go through the process. Clear milk jugs will be transformed into a park bench that’s on its way to a landfill or an incinerator, getting contaminated by various additives and dyes and losing its quality through the system. We’ve been looking at nylon fibers, for example, that can be chemically recycled, and actually up-cycled. They get better as they come back and go through the new cycle because mechanical properties have been improved, thereby increasing the quality of the fiber. Essentially, cradle-to-cradle says that if things relate and can improve soil health, then we may return them to soil.

What does your fractal triangle diagram mean to you?
We use this triangle known as the Sierpinski gasket, or fractal tile, to be able to navigate the relationships between ecology, equity, and economy. It’s a fractal way of looking at the entire universe that’s self-similar. Cost, performance, and aesthetics meet life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!

 

William McDonough is an architect and co-author of Cradle to Cradle with Michael Braungart.

Investors Shine $130M on eSolar

From redherring.com, 21 April 2008, 12:19 by Ken Schachter

eSolar, whose large-scale solar power facilities are designed to rival coal-powered plants, has closed on $130 million in funding from Idealab, Oak Investment Partners, and Google.org, the company said Monday.

The Pasadena, California, company, which competes against companies like Ausra (backed by Khosla Ventures) and SolarReserve (funded by United Technologies), plans to build a demonstration facility at an undisclosed location in Southern California later this year, said Rob Rogan, eSolar’s executive vice president, corporate development.

“We believe we’ve cut the cost of solar energy in half,” he said, without providing a firm cost per kilowatt hour. “eSolar believes we’ll be competitive with fossil fuels.

eSolar plans to use prefabricated modules manufactured oversea to cut the cost of building a solar power plant and allow utilities to build them closer to the cities that will draw their current.

Rather than use mirrors that can run to 100 square meters as other thermal solar systems do, eSolar uses mirrors that are about one square meter. Mr. Rogan said the smaller mirrors give eSolar a 10-fold advantage in concentrating sunlight aimed at tanks filled with water that is turned to steam, which is used to turn steam turbines.

Mr. Rogan acknowledged, however, that the 70-person company’s proposed 33-kilowatt power plants, large enough to power 10,000 to 25,000 homes, will be cost-effective only in regions with abundant sun like Caloifornia, Nevada and Australia.

Still, Bill Gross, eSolar Chairman and founder of Idealab, said in a statement that the business model will allow the company to compete against plants fueled by traditional fossil fuels.

“Solar’s primary business goal is nothing short of making solar electricity for less than the price of coal, without subsidies,” he said.

 

Knowledge Workers: 10,000 Times the Productivity

Do you believe that the Information/Knowledge Worker Age we’re moving into will outproduce the Industrial Age fifty times? I believe it will. We’re just barely beginning to see it. Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, puts it this way: “The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1000X but by 10,000X. Quality knowledge work is so valuable that unleashing its potential offers organizations an extraordinary opportunity for value creation.”

Stephen R. Covey, The 8th Habit
from stephencovey.com/blog

There is no doubt a new era has begun. We’re shifting from the Industrial Age to the Information/Knowledge Worker Age, and it is paramount that we understand the paradigms that drive this new era. What brought success in one economic age will not lead to it in the next. This week we ask Dr. Covey about the new mind-set, skill-set, and tool-set required to thrive in the Knowledge Worker Age.

Q: You refer frequently to the Knowledge Worker Age or Era, and we can read in several publications where the current period of history is referenced that way. Where does the term come from and what does it mean?

A: I believe it was Peter Drucker that first coined the term knowledge worker. I don’t know if he used the word era or not. He used the term to acknowledge that we were moving from an era that valued things, like machines, for what they produced into an era that values knowledge - the application of knowledge that comes in the form of skills.

Q: Are we there, or just moving toward it?

A: Well, we are just moving toward it in many, many industries; but in some high-tech industries, we’re there. Most people are unaware of this sea-lane change that is taking place and, therefore, are not preparing for it. They are unaware because they are not experiencing world-class competition that comes from a new global economy. They are in fact experiencing it indirectly through lowering of costs and elimination of a lot of bureaucracy and the uplifting of quality. But it will eventually overtake every profession and every industry. And everyone will be affected by it.

Q: Why is there so much confidence that the Knowledge Worker Age will increase productivity so significantly?

A: Simply because people are empowered; and not only people, but entire cultures. These cultures will experience an internalization of the idea of interdependency so that the mores and norms are supportive of being productive and everyone will be accountable to everybody. This will unleash incredible energy, talent, creativity, resourcefulness, and new ideas. If I could have people understand one key paradigm of the Knowledge Worker Age it would be that you manage things, but you lead people. That is how we will empower them.

Q: What are some characteristics of a team or an organization struggling to apply the principles of this era versus one that is doing it well?

A: The struggling organizations are those that are still being straitjacketed and straddled with Industrial Age structures, systems, and processes, and sometimes even the Industrial Age definition of leadership being a position. The organizations that will make a tremendous productivity gauge will come from those where the cultures are highly interdependent. Their people will be focused on three or four truly significant priorities. There will be a wide sense of mutual accountability and the so-called bosses will become servant leaders in facilitating all of the processes and making sure there is an alignment of these processes, structures, and systems with the high-priority goals.

Q: What actions can people take if they are not in a position of formal authority and their superiors seem to be stuck in the Industrial Age both in mind-set and practice?

A: Leadership is not formal authority, leadership is moral authority. If you are principle-centered, your opportunities for influence increase; and if you’re proactive and take initiative inside your own Circle of Influence, it will get larger. It will primarily get larger because of the pragmatics of the marketplace. You will simply produce more. If you have a subsidized or protected organization that doesn’t have to deal with theses market realities and this new, real, world-class competition, what I said may not happen. And you may find that the old structure and old ways will persist and there will be great resistance to a new style of leadership and to changing these deeply imbedded structures and systems. However, eventually they will have to change. Even organizations that are protected and subsidized are, in time, subject to market forces because they all have budgets and costs they have to get around.

Q: Reversing roles, if you are a boss wanting to increase the productivity of your team, what is the one thing you should be doing with your team to foster that?

A: Ask them that question. If they are codependent upon you and hesitate to speak up, walk out of the room and let them deal with that question. And ask them to bring forth their highest and best recommendations. If they are not codependent upon you, stay in the room and participate. If they push back on you, that’s fine. If you can push back on them without them feeling threatened, you have the basis for synergy and for using third-alternative solutions.

Q: What is the next era?

A: I don’t know what the next era is. I know it will evolve through this Information/Knowledge Worker Age. I’ve often called the next era the ‘Era of Wisdom’. But basically that means that the principles of each of the economic ages are brought to bear in the Knowledge Worker Age. For instance, the principle of the work ethic in the Agrarian Age and the hunter and gatherer; the principles of learning and of collaboration and teamwork and efficiency of the Industrial Age; and the principles of constantly learning and improving and applying new technologies in very synergistic and collaborative ways and seeing your own role as a leader to be a servant leader rather than a so-called boss, however benevolent” these will represent the era that we’re moving into little by little. But the actual content of the work to be done, I do not know.

National DNA Day

Posted: Thursday, April 24, 2008 7:35 PM on Cosmiclog.com by Alan Boyle

NHGRI

Your genetic code could help you relate to others - or it could be used against you.

It’s been 55 years since the landmark paper on DNA’s double helix was published, and five years since scientists revealed the complete genetic code for humans. To mark the anniversary, Friday has been set aside as National DNA Day in the US - and it’s a good time to reflect upon how genetics has transformed society.

Since 2003, genetic analysis has opened a new medical frontier. Now a new social frontier awaits as well: Several ventures have set up social networks based on genetic profiles. But there’s also a potential dark side to the DNA revolution.

Socializing with DNA
The social trend is rooted in the search for family roots: For years, companies have been offering tests that analyze your DNA for genetic markers that are passed down from father to son, or from mother to children. But once your sample is analyzed, then what? The companies set up online forums that let the people who took the tests compare their results.

That kind of genetic matchmaking led to searchable DNA databases ranging from Ybase to the Sorenson Database to the Genographic Project. (My markers are entered into all three of those sites, plus more.) And with the rise of Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook, it’s not such a leap to mix genealogy with the social-networking angle.

Last year, Ancestry and GeneTree took that social leap - and more recently, a Canadian venture called Genebase has joined the social movement as well. They’ll all sell you their own genetic tests, and right now Ancestry and GeneTree can work with DNA readings from other services - at least to a limited extent.

Too much information?
All these Web sites will surely become more socially adept as time goes - but is there such a thing as too much information? Could entering in your DNA test results lead to privacy problems? Could you be turned down for employment or medical insurance, based on a genetic predisposition to disease (or bad behavior)?

The limited number of markers that are used for genealogical purposes, and that are posted to these public Web sites, probably won’t get you in trouble. But privacy policies have to be a concern anytime you send in a DNA test, as we discussed several years ago. That’s something to keep in mind as we begin entering the era of whole-genome analysis for personalized medicine.

Right now, the going rate for having your genome fully decoded and handed to you is somewhere around $350,000 - but that rate could quickly fall to the $1,000 price point. But companies such as 23andMe are already offering less ambitious (and less expensive) tests that contain medically significant markers. The ventures are attracting big investments, even as experts debate the obvious ethical issues raised by personalized genetic testing.

To address those issues, the US Congress is considering a ban on genetic discrimination, and just today the measure won Senate approval. The bill could be signed into law next week.

Will passing a law be enough? Or will we have to guard our DNA as closely as we guard our credit-card numbers and Social Security numbers? Ten years from now, will we be worrying about genome theft as much as we worry about identity theft today? Feel free to weigh in with your comments about the dark side - and the bright side - of DNA Day.

Pale Blue Dot

I received the box set of Cosmos as a gift five or six years ago and watched all of the episodes in 3 days. I was so re-inspired (I had watched the series and explored the Cosmos as a child) that I contacted Ann Druyan at the Cosmos foundation to discuss possibilities for employing the series in Chinese schools as a tool for education and cross-cultural scientific dialogue. IP challenges prevented any progress at that time, but Cosmos maintains a role as an inspirational source and aspirational goal in my life. The following excerpt captures some of the awesome responsibility we have as human beings for ensuring and improving our lives on this planet - a central theme running through all UltraFuture events and projects. I still put the DVD’s in every few months to take a trip on the Spaceship of the Imagination.

Interestingly, Ms. Druyan told me that she and Carl were good friends of Ray and Charles Eames - designers and creators of Powers of Ten - the inspiration film that served as the first entry in this UltraFuture blog.

THE WORLD IN 2058

Masumi Yajima / Univ. of Calgary / AFP file

A researcher checks a 3-D model of the human body, projected from the walls and floor of a virtual-reality room at the University of Calgary.
Such blends of medical and cybernetic innovation are likely to become more widespread in the next 50 years.

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The mission and purpose of UltraFuture is to provide a platform for organizations and individuals to imagine and communicate visions of how we will live and interact 20, 50 or even hundreds of years in the future. In this blog, Alan Boyle of Cosmiclog.com discusses Mike Wallace’s new book - “The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today,” a collection of essays edited by the longtime journalist. Great material for discussion, the entries and essays are contributed by a who’s who list of visionaries and global thinkers - ideal candidates for keynote speakers at December’s UltraFuture Expo. Originally posted on April 18th.

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The consensus view is that we’ll muddle through many of the issues that vex us today - including climate change and terror threats. And we’ll hit upon so many medical and technological wonders that today’s 50-year-olds will have a fair chance of finding out firsthand how the world will look in 2058.

The problem with having so many predictions of the future is that they can look like a collection of to-do lists: The most popular item on the checklist would be getting your complete genetic code analyzed, so that the doctors can give you custom-made medications for what ails you (or what might have ailed you without the drugs). And don’t forget the cyber-implants: Several essayists, including inventor-futurist Ray Kurzweil, heralded the day when nanomachines would merge with our own bodies.

In addition to those well-traveled themes, “50 Years From Today” is jam-packed with nuggets of less conventional wisdom from experts in fields ranging from bioethics to counterterrorism. Here are a few examples:

• Diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder will be shown to be caused by infectious agents that take advantage of genetic predisposition, says psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Researchers will be surprised to find that many of those infectious agents are being transmitted from animals to humans. As a result, it will be uncommon to keep cats, birds or hamsters as pets - but we’ll still have dogs around, because they’ve been “man’s best friend” for so long that we’ve already adjusted to their infectious agents.
• International terrorism will be brought under control because governments will realize counterterrorism is primarily a police function rather than a job for the military, says Ronald Noble, the secretary-general of Interpol. Passports and IDs will be linked to a global monitoring system, much as credit cards are today. “People will no longer be able to travel and engage in transactions with anonymity,” thanks to surveillance and biometrics, he says. All this will pose “thorny issues” for a post-privacy era.
• Several essayists said water will become as big a resource issue as petroleum is today. “We cannot go green without thinking blue,” former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta and former Energy Secretary James Watkins say. Norman Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” in agriculture, says there will have to be a “Blue Revolution” to provide enough water for the planet’s burgeoning population. Thus, cleaning up the oceans and providing fresh water should rank right up there with controlling greenhouse gases.
• The outlook for longer life spans is a mixed bag: Kurzweil says the pace of life extension will outrun the passage of years, offering at least the possibility of an indeterminate life span 50 years from now. But trends also point to a decline in average life expectancy, due to the increased incidence of obesity among today’s young people, says Wanda Jones, director of the Office on Women’s Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Pros and cons for longer life
Arthur Caplan, a columnist for msnbc.com and director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, takes something of a middle road: In his essay, written from the point of view of his grandchild, he foresees a world where people can look forward to 140 years of high-quality life. (In a comic twist, the essay also bemoans Caplan’s death, “frail and decrepit,” at the young age of 80.)

Caplan, who is 58, told me he bases his prediction on the promise of regenerative medicine, as well as a better understanding of how lifestyle and genetics affect health. All these new technologies will raise new ethical issues, he acknowledged - for example, whether future generations will be genetically modified to fix defects and even introduce enhancements.

“People will have to think harder about whether they want to have kids the old-fashioned way,” he said. “Why would you choose to take a random chance, knowing that your child would have a chance of having a defect but going ahead anyway? You start to get into blame and guilt about disability in a way that we don’t really do now.”

Greater longevity will also have social implications, he said. “You’re not going to just have people living till 140 without changing your ideas about retirement, career, education, leisure, marriage, childrearing - also, even eligibility for social benefits. My hunch is that you’re going to have to tack on a few more years before you get that senior discount card.”

We should all have such problems, right?

For the full article visit The World in 2058

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