On that note, why privacy? The whole concept feels like it will become infeasible as we fill our world with smart devices that record our every move. If you think about it, the only reason you feel you need privacy from other people is :
a. You’re doing something wrong that you don’t want others to know about
b. You’re doing something embarrassing you don’t want others to know about.
If you can bring all the instances of (a) into the light - most notably those committed by politicians - society would be better. What about when society makes unjust and wrongful laws? Well, if there was a perfect recording of say, every homosexual act committed in a whole country, it wouldn’t be feasible to claim that that behavior wasn’t normal.
And as for (b), maybe you want to make love to your spouse in private or whatever. But if everyone else’s sex lives are also recorded, what’s there to be ashamed of? No matter what weird stuff you do, you would be able to find probably hundreds of thousands of other couples doing the same thing.
There’s more slaves now than in any other time in history. Slavery in America is legal if they’re prisoners.
RemindMe! 50 years “Is eating meat cool, or nah?”
The moral argument against eating animals is obvious, but hardly anyone cares. The backlash will be due to environmental concerns and resource constraints.
White supremacy was invented to justify colonialism and slavery. Or do you mean race science was a result of the enlightenment obsession with classifying everything?
I think emotional violence is a hugely underrated issue, and one that disproportional affects males. The focus is, however, elsewhere. I’d hope for that imbalance to be redressed and for violence to be see as violence.
A great deal of food wastage is avoidable, though. Many people still have the attitude that if you eat something 1 hour after the expiration date, it will make you sick. Many stores and restaurants throw away food that is 99.9% likely to still be edible. Society is slowly moving away from that – I know that Walmart donates some products to charity that are just past the expiration date.
This is what I was thinking too. Hopefully someday abortion will be unthinkable because the idea of being pregnant with a baby you don’t want is unthinkable due to tech advances. Instead of giving birth and keeping the kid, or giving birth and putting it up for adoption, or abortion, hopefully they will be more options, like giving your embryo or fetus up for adoption via an artificial womb or transplant to the adoptive parent, removing the fetus and maintaining it in stasis until the timing is better, fixing a embryo/fetus with genetic issues pre-birth that these days would often lead to an abortion, and massively more effective birth control.
I don’t even think this will need lab-grown meat. The sheer economic benefits of vegetarianism will push meat to the sidelines, eventually.
I am an avid meat eater. I love steak and chicken and pork chops and sushi - but there is not a doubt in my mind that the day will come when killing sentient creatures to eat them will be seen as barbaric and appalling.
Sure. We now have very powerful mechanisms to manipulate biology. From gene edits to synthetic antibodies to the ability to make almost any organic or biological molecule. We just have to know what to use these tools on, and prove it over a process that takes a decade and more than a billion dollars.
We have chosen to put a bureaucratic organization in charge of the process of approvals, and FDA administrators have an inherent conflict of interest to deny treatments to terminally ill patients in order to protect their own jobs.
Do you mean this statement seriously? Because religion is dying. If the trend continues, what we consider mainstream religions today will be relegated to mere cult status.
White supremacy was invented to justify colonialism and slavery… to people that embraced Enlightenment ideals; until you had a philosophical framework that all men have certain rights that are violated by large-scale conquest and slavery, there was no need to invent a justification for it. And it didn’t really work to use ‘well, they’re a different religion’ or ‘well, they’re a decadent culture’, because too many of the natives would convert or culturally adapt. So you needed a justification that wouldn’t just let your slaves become free in a generation or two, because you needed to keep harvesting all of those rich goods. All of a sudden your philosophy of ‘all men are created equal’ includes an ‘except for those men, their dark skin marks them inferior’ and there’s now a reason to treat them as a permanent underclass. (Scientific classification mania also helped, of course).
The Romans, in contrast, conquered huge chunks of land and took vast numbers of slaves, and pretty much used the justification of ‘sometimes bad stuff happens if you’re weak, you lost a war now stop whining.’ They never came up with the idea of classifying people based on skin color or similar characteristics and were perfectly fine considering people who adopted Roman culture as “Romans”. Other ancient empires worked along the same lines; you certainly had classes of people and good bloodlines and the like, but you didn’t have anything like modern racism fueling it, and generally conquered people get assimilated, or are subjects who you don’t care about as long as they pay taxes.
I think you’re overestimating the abilities of modern medicine. We have no way to edit genes in a developed organism, and the technology is still not fully mastered even when dealing with single cells. There are numerous genetic illnesses for which we know the defect, how it causes illness, etc., but have no way to fix it. Take cystic fibrosis. We know exactly which defect causes it, but have no way to replace the defective gene with a functioning copy into all the cells of people who have the condition. The situation is the same for every other genetic disease. There is no known way to fix a defective gene in a developed organism.
I suggest that the willful denial of human nature should go.
Collectivism can only succeed by means of force, so all the pie-in-the-sky ideas of all people being happy to work for the community without personally enjoying the fruits of their labor, and not needing consequences for wasting resources are contrary to reality.
That cite shows small trials with extremely limited successes, not people that have been completely cured. Blaming ourselves for not using genetic engineering to cure all our illnesses would be like blaming the ancient cultures that used trephining for not being able to successfully treat all the people that would nowadays be successfully treated with modern neurosurgery.
I agree with those that say that eating dead animals (along with the way livestock if often treated) will likely be considered reprehensible in the future. Hutning, too, but to a lesser degree, since at least animals live natural lives until they die. Lab-grown or meat-replacement items will eventually take over. I don’t see this attitude in 50 years, but within 100-200 (depends how long the technology takes to mature). Because it causes suffering/death to animals. And animals can feel. And when we can get the same product (lab-grown meat, not fake meat) without that, then causing that suffering uncessesarily will been seen as very bad.
The real point when it’ll be most discussed, though, will be when not everyone finds it horrible. Like 20 years after mass market penetration and the vast majority don’t think it unhealthy (in a GMOs-are-bad-for-your-health-sense) when you have generation that grew up on it and “no excuses” for not doing it and yet some people still want “the real thing” even though it means killing innocent creatures. Not sure if it actually becoming cheaper than natural meat (land costs, feed costs, electricity and employee costs, plus patents running out and how subsidies are handled are figure in to that equation, so don’t know if/when it will happen) will effect things. Class issues, status issues, etc.