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The United States can't even figure out how to make regulations to maintain a free and open internet—how's it going to regulate new technologies that let people enhance and clone themselves, create synthetic organisms, and, perhaps, cheat death?
The reality is, aging politicians and slow-moving legislatures are probably not going to be able to. Countries are increasingly going to have to rely on the communities of people developing and using future tech to regulate themselves in the absence of real rules. There's a long-known reality that technology moves faster than culture (and much faster than politicians), but it's one thing when that technology is, say, a tablet computer, and a completely different one when it's DIY neuroscience.
"For the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, our technologies are not aimed outwards at modifying our environment—increasingly, they're aimed inward, at modifying our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our kids," Joel Garreau, a Future Tense fellow at the New America Foundation, said at a Washington DC discussion about future tech regulations. "If you can do all...