Some Thoughts About Future Technologies

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster. (Oscar Wilde)

As the S&P 500 closes at another record high, the celebration of wealth and intelligence become the new religion of America. Apple and Chipotle report yet another quarter of blowout earnings. Facebook earnings due tomorrow, which will also be blowout. The left is still waiting in vain for record wealth inequality to hurt the economy, yet it simply refuses to happen as everything keeps being better than expected. Liberals are like dinosaurs; they don’t yet know they are going to be extinct. Consumer spending not slowing down.

Facebook and Google will be the first trillion dollar companies, and eventually, within the next 60-100 years, complete construction of a ‘Matrix’ that will coincide with the transition to a type 1 civilization. It won’t just be these two companies; Tesla and Amazon, having both become immensely powerful, will lend a hand in the construction – with a handful of people being appointed the overseers or information overlords.

A hypothetical technology is the implantation of false memories and the ability to erase bad ones, although care must be taken to make sure the recipient of memory modification doesn’t become aware of the inconsistencies between his new memories and real life. For example, if someone’s house burns down you can run a memory implant to make the person forget that his house burned down, but then you have to implant a new memory to account for the house being missing. Super computers can run simulations to try to come up with the best ‘chain of events’ to create a memory that optimizes the happiness of the recipient, with the fewest possible logical inconsistencies.

Eugenics also hold promise to slowly phase out less economically useful people and promote the reproduction of individuals with desirable traits, but not surprisingly, political and ethical hurdles make even considering, let alone applying eugenics, a long shot. When you mention Eugenics to republicans they tend to invoke the tired argument that the liberals like Sanger pioneered eugenics which inspired the Nazis, but even if this is true, the argument is irrelevant. The libs of today have completely renounced their earlier ties to eugenics and want nothing to do with it, or anything to do with heritability as it applies to things like crime, intelligence, education, or income. Eugenics could be marketed to republicans as a way to curtail crime and entitlement spending. Second, eugenics doesn’t have to be inhumane. It could as harmless as offering monetary incentives for low quality individuals to not procreate, or making welfare benefits contingent upon birth control. The first step would be an educational campaign to make the concept of eugenics palatable to the public, and then offering various proposals.

It’s inevitable America will adopt a eugenics program within the next fifty years to address the growing entitlement problem. Don’t believe me? People didn’t believe me when I said stocks would keep going up, that there would be no hyperinflation, or that Facebook would recover from its overblown IPO blunder to eventually double in value.