Horrors of science

In “A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology From Slipping Beyond Our Control” (Basic Books), Wendell Wallach, a scholar at Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, urges society to consider the ramifications of future tech before it’s too late. Such as:

ANIMAL PEOPLE — Humananimal hybrids, known as chimera, could serve legitimate purposes, providing a “better testing model” for new drugs, and serving as “an excellent source of organs to save the lives of humans who need new kidneys, hearts, or lungs.”

While this may be true, but do we really want organ farms filled with halfhuman creatures who feel pain, and at least partially comprehend what’s being done with them?

GENETIC HACKING— Knowledge of someone’s specific genome could allow someone to engineer a virus targeted at only one individual — say, the president. As genetic information becomes more commonly available, the frightening uses may be as plentiful as the beneficial ones.

MIND CLONES— Some experts believe we will be able to live forever by downloading our minds onto computers. But even the smartest of these experts can’t accurately predict how a world filled with virtual immortals would function, and what it will mean to “live” inside a hard drive. Wallach quotes George Mason University economist Robin Hanson, who calls such creatures “ems” (for “emulations of the human brain”), and believes that ems “would outcompete humans on almost all jobs.”

But what will the quality of life be like for an eternallytrapped consciousness?