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Much like the Agricultural Revolution, so too the growth of the modern economy might turn out to be a colossal fraud.
In 8500 BC one could cry bitter tears over the Agricultural Revolution, but it was too late to give up agriculture. Similarly, we may not like capitalism, but we cannot live without it.
a Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber, had discovered in 1908 a process for producing ammonia literally out of thin air. When war broke out, the Germans used Haber’s discovery to commence industrial production of explosives using air as a raw material. Some scholars believe that if it hadn’t been for Haber’s discovery, Germany would have been forced to surrender long before November 1918.6 The discovery won Haber (who during the war also pioneered the use of poison gas in battle) a Nobel Prize in 1918. In chemistry, not in peace.
Yet the Industrial Revolution was above all else the Second Agricultural Revolution.
Treating living creatures possessing complex emotional worlds as if they were machines is likely to cause them not only physical discomfort,
Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons.
the disintegration of patriarchy.
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Most of the traditional functions of families and communities were handed over to states and markets.
‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We,
For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.
Mum and Dad are about as likely to be found innocent in the Freudian courtroom as were defendants in a Stalinist show trial.
Moreover, bionic arms have the advantage that they can be replaced every few years, or detached from the body and operated at a distance.
What might happen to human memory, human consciousness and human identity if the brain has direct access to a collective memory bank?
How could you know thyself or follow your dream if the dream is not in your mind but in some collective reservoir of aspirations?
Could a company that develops a new creature or a new organ register a patent on its DNA sequences?
Would all humans be entitled to such enhanced abilities, or would there be a new superhuman elite?
A baby born to a poor peasant family was likely to be as intelligent as the crown prince. With the help of new medical capabilities, the pretensions of the upper classes might soon become an objective reality.
Unless some nuclear or ecological catastrophe destroys us first, the pace of technological development will soon lead to the replacement of Homo sapiens by completely different beings who possess not only different physiques, but also very different cognitive and emotional worlds.
On the other hand, nobody foresaw the Internet.
