Which of my visions have come true

I've been reading about future technologies since my senior high school days. I graduated from high school in 2001. So it's a quarter of a century that has passed since then.

My vision has been the following:

  • A society in which nobody is forced to adapt to others. Everybody may have their own religious beliefs and may even speak their own language.

  • Gene editing is legal, including germ-line therapy. This allows people afflicted with heritable diseases to have healthy children.

  • It is also allowed to modify properties unrelated to disease, such as hair color, eye color and intelligence. The effect is that there are no ugly and no unintelligent young people any more.

  • The Internet is widely used, and everybody expresses their views without inhibitions. Traditional media are replaced by electronic magazines where everybody can publish.

Basically, these have been my ideas. What has materialized?

The only thing that comes close to my vision is the Internet, but with restrictions. Since the Internet can also be used for surveillance, many people still do not dare to express their true views.

Society has partly become more liberal, but there are also authoritarian tendencies. Right-wing populism is on the rise, and the left is acting in an increasingly intolerant manner. Instead of being really free, people in the West may only vote for who is going to be the dictator that will govern them. In the East it's even worse.

Religion is playing a bigger role again than in the past, especially due to the rise of Islam in the Western world.

Finally, gene editing is still banned, with a few exceptions. The huge potential of germ-line therapy cannot be used.

All in all I seem to have been a bad prophet, probably because I underestimated the evil spirit of the people. However, I also underestimated the power of proper implementations of artificial intelligence.

Claus D. Volko 

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