Technosplit: The Bifurcation of Humanity
By Jeremy Lent,
Alternet
| 05. 17. 2017
Will social inequality soon be programmed into our DNA?
The chasm between rich and poor in the world has become so extreme it is frequently difficult to grasp. The eight richest men in the world now own as much as the entire bottom half of the world’s population. The wealthy OECD countries, representing less than 20% of the global population, consume 86% of the world’s goods and services, while the poorest 20% consume only 1.3%. These numbers translate into the shameful reality that a billion people go hungry every day and another billion remain chronically malnourished.
Nevertheless, you won’t hear much talk about these numbers in techno-optimist circles that breathlessly discuss the tantalizing possibilities of human enhancement. When futurists blithely envision the possibilities for human enhancement, they ignore the fact that billions of people are barely surviving. and will have no realistic chance of gaining access to these advances. In fact, spend enough time on these topics and you’re liable to forget that the majority of human beings are struggling to make ends meet and barely able to think about...
Related Articles
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian | 07.05.2025
Scientists are just a few years from creating viable human sex cells in the lab, according to an internationally renowned pioneer of the field, who says the advance could open up biology-defying possibilities for reproduction.
Speaking to the Guardian, Prof...
By Frank Landymore, Futurism | 07.15.2025
We are referring, of course, to the inimitable Atari 2600. Last month, the iconic system embarrassed the AI industry after it absolutely rinsed ChatGPT at a simple game of chess.
It was a clash between a machine released in 1977...
Mike Pennington / Dolly the sheep, National
Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh / CC BY-SA 2.0
The first mammal cloned from an adult cell, Dolly the sheep, was born on July 5, 1996. She became a global star, but neither she nor British embryologist Ian Wilmut (her foster daddy) got rich, though Wilmut did eventually receive a knighthood for leading the successful team. Dolly lived a pampered life and died in 2003; her body remains on display at the National Museum...
By Joel Kotkin, UnHerd | 07.01.2025
Visionaries, dreamers, and autocrats have long dreamt of reshaping humanity to their preferred model. In the last century, eugenics was enthusiastically embraced among Anglo-Saxon elites, then by Communist Russia as a means of creating a hyper-selfless Homo Sovieticus...