Various beneficial technologies will bring us changes and options that will utterly redefine first our civilization and eventually our most fundamental natures. Within the foreseeable future (i.e. within 100 years) we will have to choose, in the most most fundamental ways, who we are, what we want and where we're going.

AI/Automation (Abundance of Wealth)

• There's been a concern with automation putting people out of work for centuries. So far, we've always found new industries for people to move into - but leisure time has clearly become more abundant too.
• What happens when AI truly arrives - when machines become capable of replacing humans at almost any task - mental or physical? How do we distribute wealth when factory owners no longer need to pay employees?
• What do people do with permanent, enforced leisure time? Would a life without struggle be psychologically acceptable to people? It seems that when people don't have enough conflict in their lives, they create it.

AI with Emotions

• Building machines that think like humans is one thing, building machines that feel like humans, that have the same emotions raises many more issues.
• What are the rights of such machines?
• Are we willing to create machines that will have ability and desire to compete with us? (And if we give them human emotions, then we can certainly expect that they will want to compete with us.)

Genetic Design of Children

• Select the genes of our children so as to produce better children.
• Our civilization succeeds in large part through heterogeneity of the population - if we're able to choose our children's capabilities we will probably loose a lot of that. (At the simplest level, what if boys become vastly preferred to girls or vice versa?)

Curing Old Age

• People stay young healthy until some accident kills them.
• Not only does the population go up because people are dying much less frequently, but also because most of the female population is now of the physiological age where they can easily bear children.
• Much of our psychology and culture are built around the need to bear and raise children. How do people deal with lives in which they're no longer able to do that (because of population limits)?
• More than that, given the reduced cost of living (no more children to raise, greatly reduced medical costs), people will have much more free time - what will they do with it?
• Political and economic power structures would become even more conservative and entrenched given that those in power are no longer losing their health and ultimately dying. Old age has always been the ultimate deposer of tyrants - how do we get rid of them when they stay young and healthy?
• Moreover, having children brings people out of themselves. Children catalyze our more altruistic (i.e. group focused) emotions - if we no longer have children, those altruistic impulses may become much less frequent.
• Curing old age lessens the threat of death and so, greatly diminishes the draw of religion. We seek religion, in part, as a way to prolong ourselves beyond the grave. When that threat goes away, less people will find a draw in religion. But religion is a fundamental element of our civilization - it ties us together in communities, it encourages altruistic behavior. If religion is greatly weakened, then our civilization will be weakened also.

Body Control

• Biotechnology reaches the point where we can rebuild people's bodies at will. Facial features, body size, fingerprints, retina patterns, all can be changed. Identification based on physical features is no longer possible.
• We're probably hardwired to respond to the physical appearance of people. Male/female. Height and size. Beauty. How do we relate to each other, when our physical appearance become changeable?
• How can we possibly safeguard against impersonation? We might be able to require some sort of built in identification, but criminal organizations and foreign governments would attempt to circumvent such approaches. How do you safeguard against claimed impersonation? (I.e. Bill is seen killing Mary, but when caught afterwards claims that it was an impersonator.)

Brain Control

• If we can rebuild people's bodies at will, we won't be far away from rebuilding/redesigning their brains/minds at will. We'll be able to change their innate intelligence, their capacity for various mental tasks - and more importantly their innate emotions and motivations.
• What happens when a totalitarian country is able to design their subjects to want to fanatically serve the state? Or is able to program in any needed skills? Totalitarian countries fail because their systems inherently fail to provide the motivation needed to make their subjects effective and efficient. If they can fix that problem, and if they have no qualms about using their subjects mercilessly, then they'll have a tremendous productive and military advantage over free countries.
• And within free countries, what happens when everyone is smart, ambitious, informed and motivated? Again, there's the danger of losing the heterogeneity that we need to make our civilization work.
• What happens if, out of good intentions, we remove the "baser" emotions and drives? If we remove those, we remove part of what makes us human.
• How do we deal with the potential to acquire knowledge without going through the learning process? Or the installation of false memories of good times? Or the deletion of true, but painful memories? If we have the potential to do these things, should we?

Digitized Minds

• We learn how to fully decode an individuals brain and then to encode in electronic form - i.e. we move a person's mind into a machine.
• Problems such as brain control become much more intense - if we have the technology to download a person's mind, then we'll almost certainly have the ability to modify it at will.
• The distinction between man and machine dissappears. What's the difference between an intelligence born or created as an AI, and an AI that was created as a copy of person born as a human being?
• What happens to individuality when we have multiple copies of ourselves running simultaneously?
• The problem of immortality becomes much more pronounced. If a person is killed, then he'll be able to be restored from a backup copy. How do people handle such effective immortality? How do they handle a world in which the ultimate threat is removed? The threat of death is part of what makes us who we are.

Group Minds

• Once we reach a certain level of understanding of human brains and ability to directly affect them, we'll be able to network those brains. At the simplest level, this would function like telepathy, but with tight enough integration and replication between those minds, two different people would come to view themselves as one person with two bodies. This would provide a new sort of immortality and a vast increase in potential power.
• Machine intelligences could be networked in as well.
• If individuals are downloaded into machines, then again the distinctions between individuals and group minds are fuzzied.
• Such group minds would utterly redefine what it means to be human.
• People might be forced into such group minds.
• People who were not part of such collectives would be at a great disadvantage in terms of abilities that they could bring to bear on any problem.