Kurzgesagt has always been a favorite resource for great informational videos, but their latest is particularly excellent!
About the only thing they could’ve done better is show CAS9 and such as tiny but super-sophisticated robots (since that’s basically what they are), but nobody’s doing that yet.
I’m most excited about the ‘sure thing’ (Cancer), but the list of potentials is honestly kind of mind-boggling…and it’s also part of why almost all of our Sci-Fi is wrong.
Once somebody hacks their genome, they change the context so much that nobody can come close to writing it (though a few hard Sci Fi authors have given it a try!)
I think that the problem is not that people cannot create a real extra-human context, it’s that in neither commerce nor art is there any incentive to do so. Not unlike with avant garde artwork, people are often open to something which pushes the human experience slightly outside of their comfort zone, but strongly averse to anything which goes beyond that. Many find it hard to not see anything on the other side of uncanny valley as being other than simply a grotesque parody of humanity.
Yes, it is difficult to do. But doing it well easily yields work which has no resemblance to traditional literature, or extant structures of cognition and communication. I think that is “a good thing”. I define wealth as being new and interesting ways to think, models of reality which were not previously possible - rather than novel ways to think and do the same exact thing.
I think it is relevant to people’s attitudes to media, research, and society generally. Not only getting more thoughtful and progressive sci-fi.
