For the next few decades, most major technological advances are likely to occur in what is often denoted BNR: biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics. In pure science the secular grails now sought along the broad frontier include the deduction of how life originated on Earth, along with the creation of artificial organisms, gene substitution and surgically precise modification of the genome, discovery of the physical nature of consciousness, and, not least, the construction of robots that can think faster and work more efficiently than humans in most blue-collar and white-collar labor. At
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