What if they invent healthy cigarettes?
[QUOTE=ArizonaTeach]
I second abortion.
[/QUOTE]
Only if America slides into woman hating barbarism, which is possible of course.
[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
Smoking will probably decrease, true, but doubtful that it will be seen as “barbaric” simply because it’s so common in classic movies and those movies are going to be watched for a pretty long time, and people aren’t going to be able to look at Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall with cigarettes and think of them as barbarians. It’s more likely to be seen as something antiquated and odd. But there will still be hipsters who do it for the image.
[/QUOTE]
Unless it gets censored. I recall an Arthur C Clarke novel that included a scene where a guy was going through old movies like that and digitally editing out all signs of smoking ( or The Plague as they called it ). It was considered too offensive to show.
All of them?
[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
All of them?
[/QUOTE]
Eventually ( it was his job, there were others doing so as well ). In that future a movie with smoking was simply considered unwatchable.
I really do think that fifty or one hundred years from now, men will look back on the way they regard women now and notice the difference.
I think everything is a toss-up between whether they’ll see certain things as barbaric or merely primitive (no negative connotation implied). For example, I don’t see the four-humors leech treatments BARBARIC per se, just a primitive treatment based on incomplete understanding of the human body (or am i in the minority here?). So due to that things such as cutting people open with scalpels and stitching the wounds shut (EGADS!) when they can use lasers or glue may merely be seen as “they didn’t know that could work.” And depending on spin put on history things like racism simply may be seen as “the state of the world wasn’t ready for people to accept equality just yet.”
I really do think abortion will be seen as barbaric, not because I’m against abortion (I’m not), but because if they go with a combination of genetic engineering and lab-grown artificial womb births (even going so far as taking a natural fertilization out of the body and incubating that), as well as a possible paradigm shift concerning “biological parenting” (for example if adoption becomes very common and biological is demoted to “just another option”) they may not see a REASON for abortion because of all the adoption and alternative options they have. Or it may just be “primitive” who knows.
I’m not certain about this, but if genetic engineering is expensive for long enough I am worried about the poor and the rich becoming genetically incompatible, because of years of separation between the perfectly modified rich and the “roll the natural dice” method of the poor. So inter-class relationships may be seen as pointless at best, probably not barbaric though.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Being forced to work if you want to live at all well.
[/QUOTE]
So who’s going to make everything? Freakin robots?
I would hope that somehow in the future, the quasi-feudal notion that your entire livlihood is dependent on the whims and fortunes of your employer will change somewhat. Unfortunately the opposite seems to be true. People are working longer hours, taking less vacation while employers seem to be becoming more intrusive and demanding.
[QUOTE=An Gadaí]
Definitely both. I just wonder what the mote in our eyes is. We go “OMG, they were so racist in the 19th century” and don’t realise what we’re doing wrong. Most of us live in multicultural, liberal democracies which have enacted laws to protect those who were discriminated against in the past and would continue to be sans these laws.
[/QUOTE]
Heh, religious freedom would go by the wayside if the Straight Dope were the norm in the wider culture. Multicultural societies have the veneer of tolerance but are as intolerant as any other.
[QUOTE=FriarTed]
Elective abortion.
[/QUOTE]
As opposed to . . . *mandatory *abortions? 
“Unwanted” pregnancies.
Tivo?
[QUOTE=msmith537]
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Being forced to work if you want to live at all well.
[/QUOTE]
So who’s going to make everything? Freakin robots?
[/QUOTE]
Exactly. At some point it will simply be cheaper to have machines do all the work.
[QUOTE=An Gadaí]
What if they invent healthy cigarettes?
[/QUOTE]
If they remove the addictive nicotine, no one will smoke them.
There’s already a healthy cigarette, it’s called a joint.
I mean, it’s not pro-actively healthy for you, the way running a mile is, but in the long term, it’s nowhere near as bad as cigarettes, and probably not even as bad as a can of Pepsi.
There are other things they can put in cigarettes besides nicotine that would make people want to smoke them. I mean, who’s to say they won’t in the future invent some kind of chemical that has the mental effects of nicotine without the damage to the organs?
[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
There’s already a healthy cigarette, it’s called a joint.
I mean, it’s not pro-actively healthy for you, the way running a mile is, but in the long term, it’s nowhere near as bad as cigarettes, and probably not even as bad as a can of Pepsi.
There are other things they can put in cigarettes besides nicotine that would make people want to smoke them. I mean, who’s to say they won’t in the future invent some kind of chemical that has the mental effects of nicotine without the damage to the organs?
[/QUOTE]
Well, yes, but in general, smoking is a drug delivery system, no one does it w/o the drug part.
And, altho I will concede a joint is still likely better, they have done little research on the “two packs a day for 30 years” dope smoker. 
Smoking.
Unregulated internet.
Non-genetically modified babies.
Privacy.
Freedom of speech.
Capitalism.
Things that have become harmful and unnatural yet accepted modern practices such as parents dropping off young children into group daycare facilities instead of taking care of them.
Message-board timeouts.
Suppressive persons.
