You Cant Always Come Back To Yourself In The Future

I am not a Luddite. Nor am I a doomsdayer. But man I had a cold shiver run through me yesterday that reeked of, if not doom, then the damn precipice of.

I was listening to Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, specifically the final chapter.

Wiki nicely sums up:

He concludes by considering how modern technology may soon end the species as we know it, as it ushers in genetic engineering, immortality, and non-organic life. Humans have, in Harari's chosen metaphor, become gods: they can create species.

And thinking about cyborg engineering and genetic engineering and how these relate to…

IDENTITY…

were what gave me the damn shivers.

Programs implanted to tell us what to want, whom to love, genes implanted for fidelity…on and on.

The way we think about ourselves…how we feel whole and complete from childhood on, how we feel autonomous…

…But Harari posits a future where this changes. And he used the word disconcerting. But it is so much more.

And it just got me thinking about the Pandora’s box “myth”, the door that once opened can’t be closed, the POINT OF NO RETURN.

And I thought about people that refuse medical treatment for ailments, and sympathy ran through me.

Did they possess the long view? Did they know what it meant for identity? Did they have the species in mind, not just the individual?

The scariest part is that it is too late. Harari points out in the book that while capitalism may have its downside(s), it is too late to turn back.

And the brooding horror, sitting in the corner like a petulant child plotting revenge, is the fact that gene editing WILL happen, Cyborg engineering WILL happen. We’ve come too far.

I’m almost fifty so I don’t have to worry too much I guess. Maybe.