A quick look around should convince you that we are not created equal, and that we have not been endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, e.g., life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These magnificent fictions constitute a challenge to whatever gods there be, and are testimony to the great hearts of the founders of the American revolution. Salute.
So we'll have to create these rights for ourselves, and work on contracts with each other to render them unalienable. Sigh. A human's work is never done.
50-100 years down the road we will choose life in the form of the right genetic profile and uploads. Liberty, always having been a state of mind, will be a default state as mind becomes more autonomous. The pursuit of happiness will get the time and attention it deserves, not because we've run out of work to do, but because the work will be structured as part of the pursuit.
A post about technology can quickly leave science fiction in the dust, and it makes me glad that I've chosen a 5-year horizon for the forecasting here. Just quickly, then:
As always, in 5 years what's on the screamingly modern desktop today will be a ho-hum part of your mobile.
Nano-coatings for planes and cars will be about ready to leave the lab and streamline, protect and beautify transportation.
The first artificially designed life form will have a name.
Parents in South Korea will worry about their children forming too strong a bond with their domestic robot child-minders. Parents in America will realize it's a valid concern.
Some government will negotiate with a pharmaceutical company, offering 99 year patent protection for lifestyle drugs such as Rogaine and Viagra in exchange for the right to manufacture generic version of lifesaving drugs.
This is just chapter 1 of the tech story five years down the road. It's the conservative chapter, the one meant to convince you I'm making sober and rational assessments. It's the next chapter that starts to get weird.
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