Risk is a funny thing. It affects pretty much everything we do. And yet, most of the time we treat it like a dirty little secret. Something that’s there, but we’d rather not talk about it, a little bit like an embarrassing relative. This probably isn’t such a good idea, though.
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I vacillate…between thinking that we’re doomed because we have given ourselves over to a stupid system that’s now backed up by guns. And then a much more utopian view that we’ve always lived in stupid systems and that we’re always making them better.
Victor’s sin wasn’t in being too ambitious, not necessarily in playing God. It was in failing to care for the being he created, failing to take responsibility and to provide the creature what it needed to thrive, to reach its potential, to be a positive development for society instead of a disaster.
I think when you start using this technology for enhancement, that’s when you start to get into the domain of biohacking and kind of human augmentation. Well, I believe that this is a very fertile ground for people to explore, and I think that this involves willing participants who are trying to find out more about the world around them and trying to enhance the human experience. And I think we need to allow that innovation to take place.
There are many changes to our institutions and our norms and our ideas that can reduce or eliminate the risks of nuclear war without what I consider a rather quixotic attempt to change the course of human evolution.
When it comes to a field as fast-moving and as high of stakes as genetic engineering, how do we proceed wisely? How do we balance our own wildness and civility as we develop increasingly powerful ways to interact with the living world?
My main goal is not to die in the first place. I hope to keep living, hopefully long enough that science will have solved the aging problem and I won’t have to die. But since I don’t know how long that’s going to take, cryonics is the real backup policy for me.