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Maybe this isn't srs bsns enough for Serious Debate, but I feel like it fits anyway

Let's go crazy for a bit, assume a lot of the cool technology that is hypothesized or developing reach their potential. What's the implications of some of it?

I was thinking about designer babies recently, and how drastically they would change the average person's perspective on many things. and for that matter, change the average person.

The thing about gene engineering is that it can't change someone's personality. Yes you can remove genes that are responsible for stuff like depression, autism or such BUT you can't make your child want to be a scientist or a football player.

Not to mention like 97% of genes are towards vital shit. What I'm implying is that even if we do go crazy with it 97% of gene kits on store shelves will be for diseases and such. So like in twenty years imagine your local walmart; gene kits to make you stronger or change your hair color would all be on one shelf.

"What about gene kits for higher intelligence?"
There are some genes responsible to bump up a person's intelligence, but nothing that we know of for super intelligence. That would require developing gene kits for genes not found in nature and we've never seen before; it's not that we couldn't do it, rather stuff like that has a fuck ton longer than twenty years from now before it hits store shelves and by then there probably would be a lot of alternatives by then.

Gene engineering is important and probably will be widespread, but by the time we can give people say cat ears other technology will have long already made that possible.

I am more interested in metallurgy, clean renewable energy, environmental friendly initiatives, and construction techniques more than genetics though. Imagine if we do not have need for fossil fuel anymore and have clean and easily accessible renewable energy, I can turn on my aircon almost all the time for summer; if we can see greeneries in and on the buildings in New York; memory alloys which restores a shape and function of a car after an accident or a bump; construction techniques which let buildings survives earthquakes and storms, reducing deaths and damage it causes.

Genetics for me though, should not be touched except for curing genetic disorders and diseases like YourHigherBrainFunctions said. Designer babies are out of the question for me. I once read a short story long while back. It goes like this:

Advances in genetic and designer babies, humanity took evolution into their own hands, feminists asked for lessened aggression in male to prevent rapes, parents asked for obedient, easy to raise kids, children with "cuteness and smiles" painted on their genes and souls, etc.

Two generations passed, the third generation of designer babies however spelled doom for humanity. They are like dogs and cats in human form, non-functioning, infertile, etc. The previous generation have only few decades to fix this before humanity become extinct, but the working vanilla template was lost to the annals of time. The main guy is the only sole non-designer human alive hidden away somewhere by his parents were born in-between first and second generation, but both were the few non-designer babies back then and were considered weird but not ostracised.

tl;dr I do not trust evolution in the hands of our fellow man. For their hubris proves times and times again to be their downfall.

Eh. I have doubts anything like that story would happen. I get the sentiment but that particular story just seems so unfeasible in so many ways. The idea that humanity would agree on some particular gene sets, that any gene modification wouldn't go through multiple generations of chimpanzee testing, people are going to be scared of the implications of this and it'll be on lockdown for eternity

@Clownfish
The thing is about that is that chances are it'll be illegal to use it on kids that isn't to correct diseases… Well in the west anyhow.

In the west I think we'll have a drastically different problem in the future. Have you ever watched the anime Chobits? Really old anime. Basically what it was about is that domestic robots got to the point where humans preferred to marry them over other humans. Another good old anime was armitage iii; what that was about was that on Mars cause immigration tends to have more men immigrating to other places there wasn't enough women on mars so companies created artificial person to offset.

..
..
I'm going to get shit for this:
What I think is going to happen in the long run is that companies will have to make humanoid robots that are capable of copulating. Why? Cause if you're making robots that are meant to be waifu material then you're going to run into the chobits situation of "well shit our population would rather date robots meant to be highly likable" the only way you could fix that without further tanking a country's economy would to start rolling out robots capable of having human children.

What I think is going to happen in mid 2030's in the west;
Company, "Let's make our humanoid robots highly likable with no personality flaws"
birth rate crashes
Company, "Oh fuck! We made them too likable! Let's have future models capable of having human children"
birth rate returns to normal

Tldr;
Most probable future:

No need to downboat on everything. The ideas of parents being able to enhance or choose attributes and colour and their children just sounds wrong to me.

Also there were some interesting concept videos about future back years ago:

As good as it may look. Hope a stray football from the field will not shatter those glasses though, or if someone sings with a high enough pitch. Or maybe those glasses with be durable enough to withstand a lot of damage. Also transmitting all those data, research is still going on whether excessive radio wave causes any harm or not?

So for now, I am sticking with construction technique for earthquake/tsunami/storm resistant buildings, renewable energy, eco friendly tech and restoration, advances in metallurgy (including industrial grade ultra durable plastics which are used in aviations too), and also aviations. Maybe we will finally get a cruise airship, or airships that can only take 2-3 hours for a round globe trip, maybe I could drop in by KYM-con (if it was not a total cancer fest by then lol) in the future being a grognard.

@YourHigherBrainFunctions
Yes, I have watch Chobits (along with my sisters) back then. I do not think people are that silly about sex robots. I mean:

Birthrate declines, what do
Stop making/fucking sex robots and fuck other humans. Problem solved rather than spending other billion on making robots capable of giving birth when some women are still "barren" and we still have not fixed it.

Was not the points of Chobits was making/experiment about a computer (robot) capable of feeling love (Chis whole raison d'être) love without sex (if main guy sticks it in, Chi resets), and different types of love (without relating it to sex). And did not in the end, the guy who married a computer ends up having real relationship with that girl. And the movie Her, did not the main guy go back to human intimacy?

Clownfish… There is no gene for "docile behavior". Most human behavior is learned. Yes there are some general traits that do effect a person's behavior, but those are general stuff like "lots of energy", "anxious", etc.

@Clownfish
"Stop making/fucking sex robots and fuck other humans."
Feminists tried to ban current sexbots… They got their ass kicked. It pissed off not just internet users, but companies investing into humanoid robots cause the push was to ban all humanoid robots which would have dicked over numerous companies.

Pretty much what happened:
(satirical but you get the point)

If there's another movement to stop this chances are it's going to attract the attention of big name companies who just want to make humanoid robots again.

@clownfish

honestly i only downvoted freely as I was under the impression that you could change vote on forum threads unlike comments, kinda like editing messages. turns out nope, know your meme ain't up to snuff with normal websites there.

"And the movie Her, did not the main guy go back to human intimacy?"
Nope; he stayed with Chi.

I mean in the movie called "Her". A movie about sentient AI (OSes) and human relationship, in the end. Did not the main guy returned to human intimacy instead of company of the OSes (to be fair, the OSes left humanity though, because they went all collectively in love with each other and left for other plane of existence).

And about companies against sex robot being pressganged with companies for sex robot. I am going to leave this:

Disgusting, pressganging, bullying, for selfish gains and profits without ever discussing or hearing what is or should be right or wrong, a pirates democracy for profit and selfish agendas rather than the common good.

Sorry, sidetracked again. Back to the topic. I am not really fine with sentient or half-sentient robots (automated machines and factory robots are acceptable though), genes splicing, and trans-humanism though. Humanity, for all its flaws and its shortcomings; they are fine as it is I believe.

@Clownfish
The thing is though regardless we're probably going to run into trans humanism at some point.

The new thing technology wise is neural nets and chips that effectively architecturally mimic how brain cells function. The thing is that in order for technology to advance these HAVE to happen, but these technologies are the fundamental building blocks for stuff like cybernetics, ai and such. These HAVE to happen though, cause while they are the basis of things you personally don't like if we do not invest in them humanity will technologically regress.

Reason why transhumanism probably is going to happen regardless of anyone's opinion:
If you banned neural nets, deep learning, neurochips and such yes it would stop transhumanism from happening but all of silicon valley would go bankrupt and you would probably cause another recession.
"No it wouldn-"
Banning it would be like banning electricity and then wondering why the economy went to shit.

Conversations abut transhumanism usually steer into the ethical and legal ramifications of such technology. After all it forces us to confront the question of what it means to be Human in the first place. When people start designing their children then it becomes imperative to create a new Humans in this way lest your own children fall behind.

When I talk about transhumanism though I usually completely separate it from modern context. I think any future Human civilization where this technology is common pace would have different ethical sensibilities than our own.

With that out of the way, I don't think you could make outright superior children by just adding and removing genes. At most you would only be able to change their physical attributes. You wouldn't be able to do anything crazy because any of the genes you add would have to already come from a Human. Hopefully any future Humans smart enough to design their own babies are also smart enough to avoid genetic bottleneck. I've seen some works tackle this, usually the new population ends up sterile or having genetic degradation as they run out of new genetic material.

Genetic engineering is best used to further medicine. Getting rid of mutation based diseases and abnormalities seems like the first step. But even this has its own problems because then as Humans start living longer and dying less we would need to somehow increase food production and living space along with it.

Hopefully any future Humans smart enough to design their own babies are also smart enough to avoid genetic bottleneck. I’ve seen some works tackle this, usually the new population ends up sterile or having genetic degradation as they run out of new genetic material.

Any society that can genetically engineer to that degree can fix that problem immediately, they could alter their genes however they want, or even create DNA from raw elements. Plot devices like that are absurd.

Yeah…that's…that's gonna bite us in the ass…

The human genome only has 19000 genes in it; even if we change it slowly it's totally realistic to change it completely.

Personally, considering the massive seed banks we already have, I feel there would probably be a gene bank of natural human genes in the future.

Anyway, to get back into general futurology, what do you guys think the far future of human society will look like? There's many competing technologies for our futures, a lot of which have competing visions. Like why would genetic engineering matter if we all end up hooked to virtual reality fantasy world anyway? What technologies do you guys think will win over.

To note, humans don't necessarily need to live the same global vision of the future. Think America vs Europe with transportation, where the US became a car-focused society while Europe is more focused on public transportation and allows stuff like jaywalking. Same tech, different applications.

Great…people are going to be products now, like society didn't fuck with you enough

I think around where I live, it would not become exotic sci-fi movie-esque high tech though. Just twenty minutes into the future like Anno 2070.

Researches and tech go into agricultural sector, tree nurseries, greeneries on buildings, and clean renewable energy for sustainable living.

Advances in aeronautical and transportation to establish supply routes and trades. And natural disaster resistant buildings and prevention measures because we can.

Advances in preventative and regenerative medicine fixing problems at the root as well as promoting healthiness on many levels.

People are mostly the same as today, only technology level changes.

It's a hard thing to predict, we only have what we currently know to extrapolate from and the occasional piece of sci-fi. I'm thinking for the foreseeable future it's going to remain somewhat similar, but with constant additions sneaking into our lives that are hard to expect, but don't quite change the outside; think smartphone-level changes.

And on the thought of genetics, a webcomic I read while it was still running, Genocide Man, explores those themes in a way I quite enjoyed, even if the future portrayed there was somewhat unnerving. It was a world where mastery of genetics reigned, but due to so much of every invention being open and available to everyone, the world had essentially gone on a tense, cold war-esque lockdown with all transhumanism forbidden and genetics tampering being very, very closely monitored, because the century was marred with genetic supersoldiers and designer plagues that wiped away entire nations and ethnicities. Life as a whole continued, and was even better if similar to what it was now, but you could always taste the tension in the air, despite everything being relatively normal you knew the world almost died.

I think we can control ourselves before we actually end up building plagues to wipe out entire races, but it's a worrisome thought. And controlling ourselves in itself can be another, though I also doubt it'll hit the comic's extreme of the UN equivalent having a thought police to crack down on that.

@documents1
Personally I think the USA and Europe will look completely different culturally in fifty years.

Europe will probably feed their people through vertical farms, underground cities to deal with global warming and use gene engineering for primarily treating diseases.

Every country will probably use the internet for education though.

China I'm not sure about; they're starting to get to the point at which they have to get their shit together.

Asia as a whole will be okay.

Africa is thinking about forming a confederacy. I think what they're going to do in the long run is turn north africa into a giant solar farm to help offset the damages from global warming.

Even more war in the middle east. Their countries are kind of being dumb cause many of their countries are refusing to diversify their economies so once they run out of oil that's going to be a bad situation.

South America is probably going to have a hard time adjusting to global warming, but they'll probably be okay in the long run.

The USA: people will if anything complain about the USA even more. The reason being is that our government is actually excited about gene engineering and recently gave the go ahead for clinics to use it. Our government is already investing heavily into trying to making neurochips a reality, the DOD is working on it. Companies are already super excited about robots.

What the majority of the world is probably going to look like:

What the USA is probably going to look like, given how much our government and companies are very much for these technologies given without any disregard:

Rest of the world, "We need to carefully and thoughtfully develop new technology cause it might alter how we view being human"
USA, "Let's do gene engineering and robotics as fast as possible"

"If you banned neural nets, deep learning, neurochips and such yes it would stop transhumanism from happening but all of silicon valley would go bankrupt and you would probably cause another recession.
“No it wouldn-”
Banning it would be like banning electricity and then wondering why the economy went to shit."

Eh…be it, we have been through worse.

I predict that as long as the current status of the US exists (it's an ancient status quo we're dealing with here), our technology usage will be dictated quite a bit by corporations. Assuming the internet and that expansion of mass media isn't the perfect counteraction, as it is making it way easier to learn about things like that.

Much like the US made jaywalking illegal and made cars instead of public rails the norm in cities due to car company pressure (source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-moloch/), so too will other technologies war to gain societal approval. Not just technological presence, but technological entrenchment.

And as long as that is the case, trans humanism shouldn't happen.

I disagree, american companies are the ones pushing for it the hardest.

Why? Gene engineering is much cheaper than modern medicine. Some anti-cancer medicine costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Currently gene kits for cancer are in human trials; once that hits the market companies can just stop producing anti-cancer medicine and rely on gene kits.

"What happened to my medicine? I don't want to take a gene kit"
"Well too bad we don't carry your medicine anymore"
"But I have cancer"
"It's a gene kit or you die"

Oh I know they are pushing for it, I know it will happen if things keep going as they are, I am arguing it shouldn't. Unless there was some drastic hopeful change to society so that trans-humanism was used in a good way, which there won't really be, things are always changing but in a sort of "we must endure" kind of way.

The thing people forget is that science in of itself isn't good or bad, it's a tool through which we develop better tools.

That's one of the reasons why star trek was bullshit is that it treated science as though it was fundamentally lawful good. Science is lawful neutral.

I'm going to get shit for this, but I do think we're going to see human-animal chimeras in the USA at least.

The reason being is that while currently such animal testing only imparts a few genes in the USA this kind of research has gotten drastically looser regulation whereas elsewhere the laws on it are getting stricter and stricter. Obviously we're nowhere near anything seen in scifi but there is a drastic difference in legality.

Basically everywhere else in the world: if you turned cats into catgirls you would lose your medical license and get thrown in jail.
In the USA while there would be a massive uproar it wouldn't be illegal.

Wait so those weren't jokes? People actually want to create humans with cat ears for no real reason? Wow…

Current animal-human hybrids are for medical purposes. Like you'll be able to transplant a pig heart into a person. The idea of this is that if a person is having their organs fail transplant organs from animals into them.

This would allow for mass organ transplants without the need for a human donor. Hearts, lungs, livers, spleens, stomachs, etc. The downside is that the more and more and more human genes you start inserting the less and less crazy animal people seem.

Combine with the porn/sex crazed society we have now and the rampant materialism that has always existed and we may be ending with a society that resembles the eldar before the fall, though with less illegal degeneracy and more economic inequality and weird hedonistic elitism. (I'm not against porn or saying we are are degenerates (right now) I'm just saying the future we are heading sounds uncomfortably slaaneshy and I have always been a more of a nurgle guy you know?)

Thinking about it; there's only two countries in the world that would want robots intentionally made to be spouses: obviously the USA and the other being Japan. Japan really does not like immigration to any extent; their country would probably go "Well my son is dating a robot. That's a lot better than him dating a foreigner. All these rat hole countries want to invade our country and breed with us? Hell no."

There's only two countries that would be excited for gene engineering not for treating diseases. The USA and China. If you think "gene engineering should only be treating diseases" you would have a nuclear meltdown in anger reading about what China is doing. "What are they doing?" Welllll….. It's pretty obvious they want Homo Sapiens 2.0 It's pretty obvious what they want are humans that are smarter, perform better, never get sick, need less food and such. Like in thirty years if you live in Asia and you got in a war with them you would get riggity rekt.

Ectogenisis is far more terrifying than gene engineering or such. Basically what this is allowing embryos to develop till birth in a lab without needing to be in a woman's body or such. We're currently working on this. The reason why it's scary is imagine a legitimately racist country getting hands on this. They'd be able to completely wipe out other races, in a nonviolent manner, from their country in only a generation.

The USA is currently expediting laser defense. With how North Korea now has the H-bomb that lit the fire up everyone's butt to defend themselves. Why is this important? It'll make nuclear weaponry as a whole technologically obsolete. The downside is that this technology will be massively out of the hands of poor countries. Effectively USA, Russia and such could nuke you but you wouldn't be able to nuke them. Hell you wouldn't be able to use missiles on them or rpgs cause they'd all get shot down. It would give rich countries a even further massive advantage in wars whereas poor countries would get a even further disadvantage.

Self driving cars: chances are in a decade the production of human piloted cars and gas cars will be banned.

Solar power will be king. A new type of solar panel being looked at is basically several layers of different photo-voltaic metals and also using the heat to produce electricity. Right now solar panels are 20% efficient; chances are twenty years from now it'll be 50% efficient. Not to mention that solar power is getting to the point at which oil companies are investing in it, cause they're starting to see the writing on the wall for fossil fuels.

Like I said before chances are education will be 99% digital with very few humans involved in actual teaching. If you create a digital education service if a student is serious about learning they'll succeed; if a student doesn't care then they'll fail at life. The downside of that is we're probably going to have a lot of adults who didn't care about their education and wound up effectively being second class citizens.

Block chain. That has me very excited, cause with that if you have mail coming, order a pizza and want a uber driver your uber driver would show up with your pizza and mail. What this is it's basically like bitcoins in which there's not real money being traded, but rather you're trading ledgers and receipts for goods and services. A company that makes copper wires would be able to trade copper wires to a external company and bring in raw copper ore without needing to actually touch a bank account. "What's so good about this?" It's nearly impossible to steal any money or goods, cause it's basically a ledger containing millions of transactions. Companies are super excited about this. Under this it would be incredibly hard for companies to go bankrupt; it's not that they couldn't rather if the company went bankrupt it would have to be purely intentional.

Stock market and all companies' finances or governments' finances handled by computers. We're slowly moving towards this.

Businesses and governments handled by computers; this one is a bit tricky, bbut it's totally doable. It's going to take years of research, but it's going to take a while till we can go "computer handle the entire government".

NASA will probably be working towards colonizing Mars. The electromagnetic rocket engine has been tested to work numerous times, all that is left is launching it next year and seeing if it works. If it works we'll probably see a couple hundred people living on Mars in a couple decades. "What about radiation?" Rockets to get to Mars their cockpits will probably be shielded, it'll be cramped but it'll get them there. They'd probably use remote controlled robots to handle stuff outside of the cockpit. "What about radiation on Mars?" Make your home underground.

We'll probably mine asteroids instead of mining on Earth. You know how much rare earth metals are in asteroids? If companies were to do this they'd be looking at trillions of dollars in profit cause estimates place that it'd be seven times cheaper to get stuff like neodynium from asteroids than on earth.

We'll probably make a mass driver in the next decade. We can shoot heavy objects that fast, the problem now is we need to speed up objects slow enough to not kill people. The sled would have to be like five miles long. It's not that we can't do it; rather you better be damn sure it's working before sticking humans on it.

Oh I thought of something else: the USA will probably be the biggest space colonizer. NASA is the ones working on the electromagnetic engine, they're working together with a company to make deep space rockets for propelling colonists to Mars, NASA is making a smaller shuttle with the intents of extreme long term space travel and such.

"Not getting it"
Basically NASA is making rockets and space shuttles capable of deep space travel. It's going to be another decade until we're damn sure everything works before sending people to Mars.

Speaking of genetics and rare materials, depending on how fast protein engineering, biocatalysis and general understanding of microorganism biology all advance, we might be able to get a whole new branch of stuff; some of the closest possibilities there are completely biological replacements for plastics and fuels, all manufactured by microbes you essentially just need to feed with sugar and keep warm and stirred for a while. Beyond that, even if it's something I have a personal stake in, I genuinely don't quite know what we could get because the possibilities are actually quite open; if you're really good at it you could essentially achieve something like biological nanomachines, with the advantages and disadvantages of that. Wish I knew more speculative science in this area though, I've stuck to the present and really close future.

@Mr. Candles
NASA is currently looking towards using non-traditional building materials for stuff.

Basically what they're thinking of combining 3d printing with using like a lattice structure on stuff not traditionally used to make it stronger and use that for stuff. Basically imagine being able to make a ladder out of stuff not traditionally used, it would have less durability but it would be cheaper and biodegradable.

Everything is always "renewable" "biodegradable" and "3d printed" in the future, they are basically buzzwords at this point.

I did list the obvious downside to it: it wouldn't last nearly as long. Like let's say you really needed a shipping container, but you couldn't get one in until next week. "Fuck it; throw a bunch of tree logs into the printer" It would break after a couple uses, but it would be stupidly cheap.

The main people it would help would be third world countries. Broken tire? Make one out of wood. Water pipe broke? Make one out of effectively kilned dirt.

Basically this style of "fixing" broken stuff:

I think the most important invention of our time is probably solar energy though. Solar energy is the one energy source that is pretty guaranteed to have little downsides besides mining for the materials to make solar panels global. Humans couldn't live off of combustible materials under the ground forever, we needed to make like the plants that power this earth and use the sun.

Side note, here's a mindfuck. In an ecological sense, if humans largely switch over to solar power, society would be a weird equivalent of a forest. We consume light and use it build things to keep society going and growing, and what we build ends up playing host to other animals as an environment of its own (raccoons raiding trash, city pigeons and squirrels, etc.)

And tying into what I was saying, solar panels aren't the only way. Some have been making plans to use plankton and other microscopic plants to gather the energy with that instead, and have them stock that energy up as fuel we can then collect and burn. Not sure if it's viable, but someone's at least trying.

They're already working on it. The problem with it is that it's $5 a gallon.

For now, at least. Either petrol rises above it, or it falls below petrol, but I trust one day it should work.

It probably will one day.

I'm being a little rude, I think part of the reason why so many people don't want us to start colonizing space is that a lot of countries are lagging behind a few countries. In 2050 we're probably going to have a couple thousand people living on Mars, but the people there will either speak English, French, German, Japanese or Chinese.

How scifi depicts space colonization: a large international effort where EVERY country in the world contributes.
How space colonization is probably going to be: only five to ten countries making offworld colonies.

The thing is that if we wait till everyone can contribute we'd have to wait till 2200 till everyone is capable of contributing.

I think people in other places other than USA will probably be fine without gene clinics or gene kits. American imperialism does not effect us here much, not even in Japan. If American offer gene kits for cancer or AIDS, we will just make our own.

Also, about robots and human chimeras, if they are probably will be met with opposition and pushing it too much will either create a civil war or literal race war, or people will just say "screw you guys, I am going somewhere else."

And also: Realistically speaking. Priorities of what most countries would be to put R&D and techs into agricultural sector so they will not have to import food to survive any more and gain sustainability; advances in medical science to treat cancer and other contractible diseases to prevent epidemics and deaths, construction technique and metallurgy for sustainable city designs and strong housing and city not cramped like a rat cage.

The four necessities: Food, clothing, medicine, housing. These has always been the focus of humanity when it advances in technology level.

From gatherer-hunter we learn agriculture, and from that many techniques. Our clothing from a fig leaf, leather, hard non-linen clothing, to comfortable and functional wears. From herbalism and tribal remedies, to traditional medicines, and then modern medicines (thank God for vaccines). And from a mud house, come a building out of clay, wood, stone, etc. To many variances of it like tudor, cottage, colonial. A walled city to modern metropolis and come the tall buildings and skyscrapers.

As far as I am seeing in this thread. Only U.S.A. has the resources (or the shadowy hands of the megacorps) and the skewed priorities of sex robots, genetically-engineered catgirls for domestic partnership, VR world, turning human into robots, and other sorts of things that are very likely to led to decadency instead of wholesome techs like the above paragraph.

Scariest things right now would be "Augmentations" straight out from Deus Ex because functional replacement limbs are the closest thing. The game already had a few guesses for us the implications of it. People forced to augment (mostly cut off their healthy limbs or getting implants and have to regularly inject neuropozine) to work (or fall off the job market) like all sorts of engineers or construction builders. Not to mention that it could be hacked because nothing on the internet is safe. At least nobody can "hijack" our organic limbs. No, I am not against mechanical functional replacement limbs, but the "Augmentations" itself though.

"As far as I am seeing in this thread. Only U.S.A. has the resources (or the shadowy hands of the megacorps) and the skewed priorities of sex robots, genetically-engineer catgirls for domestic partnership, VR world, turning human into robots, and other sorts of things that are very likely to led to decadency."

Very likely my ass, our fate is sealed.

@No
Hail Slaanesh!

Then ditch that place and settle somewhere else, or stay and fight to the end.

"The most important being and thing in the world is the ability to be able to let go of everything to be able to protect/save and fight for that one most important thing that remains."

Ancient catechism in Asia. Not sure if Chinese or Japanese in origin, but you get it: If tomorrow Valve makes me take the Mark of the Beast to keep my Steam games, I will ditch it with no looking back nor any hesitation. $3.000 spent on it be damned, I can find another $3.000 if I still have my life not chained to the daemon and being its sex slave by getting fucked by it every day.

Just wait till the imperium is created buddy!

@Clownfish
Oh! Speaking of which; a couple months ago it was found that organic brain matter is compatible with neural nets. They tested it on mice and it took a little bit for the brains to adapt but they worked with it very well. So yeah Deus Ex is 100% possible.

Personally I think all but three countries in the world will be something like in star trek where everyone is a space hippie their goals science wise are betterment of mankind. Like I said they'll probably be using vertical farms and shit.

I disagree partially:
China will probably go to GATTACA… It's pretty clear what their intents are with their research.
Japan will probably go to "artificial persons". If you have humanoid robots that are able to perform in most every day tasks, raise children, take care of a household and bear children that would probably make Japan smile with glee. "You mean we can just close off our borders forever and reverse our population decline? Sign me up"

Yeah the USA on the other hand is going to go hog wild.