Technology

I love tech. My parents gave me my first computer in 1983, and my dad taught me how to program it. I turned that into a profession that I'm still loving 35 years later. Some day soon, we can marry humans with circuitry and we'll have computer peripherals that will interface directly with our brains. We will be able to communicate wordlessly, present images and diagrams just by thinking. Maybe we will some day be able to remove our brains from our diseased bodies and keep them alive while retaining machine inputs and outputs. We will be Cyber Men! Most likely, the zombie-apocalypse-like technology envisioned by at least one episode of Doctor Who won't be upon us, but certainly there will be technological improvements such as self-driving cars and the dawn of robot soldiers (like those at Boston Dynamics) and the ethical dilemmas about how young or old or under what circumstances is someone able to have their brain modified by circuitry, and for what purpose. Personally, I'd love to be able to command a robot dog with a chip in my brain over Bluetooth or WiFi, or maybe post blogs in my sleep. We won't all agree, but we'll likely think in competition with the great nations of the world that at some point we lose out if we don't get there first, so we will invest and build a little bit out of the public eye... Similarly, we'll deal with people in Congress who don't understand the basics of the foundation of the technology for which modern life depends, nor will they be willing to embrace future potential that redefines what it is to be human.

Great medical advancements will be made by genetic engineering our genes to produce new organs grown inside our own bodies via stem cells... The kind my father would have benefited from rather than requiring my donation of a kidney. Advancements such as Cancer-fighting medications and cures will be the goal of many medical science and research institutions, but so will be fighting degenerate illnesses that will spring up as medical enemy number one after Cancer. Maybe even some of the research from those efforts will make a difference against Cancer. Science is one of those things you can't predict.

My hope is that the future isn't set back by a lack of vision or by some of the competitors (be they nations of companies) in the space reflecting poorly on others. I want my children to grow up in a world with self-driving, fusion-powered cars.