zidane1strife said:You've not a remote idea of the advances that are taking place right now... the simplest of stuff that's in the labs, could very well result in things like commercial regrowth of teeth, cure for the crippled, in about a decade. That's just the tip of the iceberg. The combined advances in computing, in genetic engineering and screening tools, in nano-tech, in functional genomics, etc, etc... Make for an exciting time.
Hmmm I think you are a little too optimistic. If everyone is willing to chip in to total a trillion dollars or so yeah prolly could have that in a decade. I would say more like 3 to 5 decades depending on how various politics on forcing max cost of treatments in such occur or not (if they do expect a fairly big stagnant in the rate of cures and devices to heal, they will likely still occur but just at a much slower rate(well unless the governments suddenly decides they plan to give out lots more money)). Also, costs are going to stay high as it gets harder to be able to reverse engineer and produce items (example antibody drugs happen to be the best drugs to treat rheumatoid arthritis, unfortunately its a $20,000 a year treatment and its not what you would call reverse engineerable per say and happens to be pretty expensive to make (due to its made with live rabbits and such)).
(I will say the Japanese government though is one of the most serious governments at science research though they do have a little varied interests from the US (exampled giving out equilvalent of $1 Billion out for research in rice (preventing dieseases in them, better growing, improvements in cooking, etc) and they love researching robots))
Hehe, plus disregarding the costs then comes up the issues with the ethics of being able to literally being able to cure everything almost. In the short term I don't think humanity is prepared to deal with the issues that will arise in the long term I do though.
Read some Asimov or some other various authors on their opinions on a society where robots replace those in jobs (if you think unions bitch already enough about jobs going elsewhere or automated, what do you think the populace will say when you tell them there is no need for them and robots can do it all).zidane1strife said:Automation allows for a job-less society, things would be virtually free. We'd just have to hope people choose an acceptable solution to this dilemma... worst case most could end up in slums separated from the lucky few by automated killing machines.... hopefully that wont happen
The major issue, has to do with people aren't going to be happy doing nothing except twiddling their thumbs and living in a hedonistic world (unfortuantely the way the brain is those things will get dull real fast, happens to be rarity has a lot to do with how much we value particular activties which isn't too surprising).