@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:Im not as optimistic as you.
By the way, when I said "most impactful" in my post above, I didn't necessarily mean it would all be for the good. It's going to be a very sharp sword on both edges, the good and the bad.
Until now, or primary technological skill as a species has been almost exclusively devoted to the manipulation of Electromagnetism (electricity). Without it we would be an agrarian society. Electricity now dominates our civilization.
We are now entering a new technological realm focused on Biochemical Genetic manipulation. Genetic testing will reveal fatal genetic diseases before our children are zygotes, and parents will demand to apply the "cure", and ethicists will bend. And once they bend at all, and they will, the dam will break. Genetic diseases like Haemophilia, ALS, Sickle-Cell, Tay-Sachs, etc, will all be gone within a few generations because parents will demand it, politicians will follow. Then people will want non-germ line changes, like sharper eyes that can see UV light or Infra-Red, and better hearing, and cholesterol plaque resistance, and I bet all of that will slip right through the ethics filter further weakening the dam. And as you mentioned, China and North Korea and a thousand other little private labs around the world are going to be doing whatever they damn well please. It's hard to imagine anything stopping this process from unfolding.