As humanity discovers more about genetics, some fascinating (and scary) options begin to present themselves. In addition to curing diseases with this new information, scientists may also soon discover the genes for height, physical beauty, increased memory, and maybe even musical ability. Further down the line, they may be able to manipulate these genes, opening the door to enhancing these abilities and traits in children. They may even discover how to give kids new abilities altogether.

When it comes to enrolling kids in the best schools or positioning them on the best sports teams, most people don’t bat an eyelash. But tampering with their genes seems somehow over the line. Some even compare it to playing God. As long as geneticists can guarantee the safety of this tampering though, it’s difficult to see how tailoring genes is much different than selecting a really good school.

But just as the well-off enroll their kids in the best schools, they may be in a position to get them the best genes as well. This threatens to take the inequalities present in today’s society and turn them into permanent, separate classes of the genetic haves and have-nots.

Making artificial life forms that think and feel is an old idea that lies at the core of many science fiction books and movies. The creation of such beings clearly points to the need for cheap and pliant workers. However, at some point these robots will become really advanced—perhaps as advanced as humans are. And at that point, their subordination by humans will seem ethically problematic. Won’t they deserve moral consideration?

The issue of “robot rights” will be a tough one to solve. Will humans have the right to mistreat robots, even if they can think and reason like humans do? Will humans have the right to enslave, mistreat, or even destroy them like property? For some, robots will surely lack basic rights because they aren’t human. They’ll be considered “just machines.” But such an argument will look groundless, arbitrary, and speciesist.

No doubt, arguments also will be given that while robots can think like humans, they can’t feel pain. However, many people are willing to grant rights to humans and not animals even though both feel pain, arguing that only humans can think and reason—a quality such advanced robots would surely have. So human beings in the future may have to concede that robots have rights after all, at which point the purpose of their creation—forced labor at human whims—will be wiped away!

Managing the Growing Population of Planet Earth

The earth’s population reached 6 billion people at the beginning of the 21st century. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. As the world strives to feed these 6 billion people, many fear that resources will become scarce. If the population continues to increase at this rate, humanity has a limited number of choices. It could simply let people starve to death until they stop reproducing, but that doesn’t strike many folks as a terribly ethical choice.

But other responses threaten to violate rights as well. To stem population growth, some people have advocated mandatory sterilization or contraception, regulations against having more than two children, or mass migrations to less densely populated areas. Fortunately, evidence is mounting that economic development targeted toward women and girls leads to declining birthrates. Could feminism be the answer to the world’s population problem? Only time will tell.

Dealing with Dramatic Increases in the Human Lifespan

The future holds many promising developments, including medical technologies that can extend your lifespan. Would you like to live to be 200? How about 500? Perhaps you want to be immortal? What in the world could be wrong with that? Could ethics possibly have a problem with long life?

The Taoists have an interesting response to this question. A central component of Taoist ethics includes cultivating one’s capacity for wu wei, which literally means doing nothing. This doesn’t literally mean to stand still or refuse to act; instead, it means not to push against the natural things in the world and in life and to instead try to live in accord with the way the world naturally is. In a way, wu wei is a method for learning how to stop forcing your individual will on the world. Using science to actively fight against the natural change from life to death may strike a Taoist as strangely abnormal, selfish, and controlling. After all, it’s natural that everything changes. In fact, a famous Taoist, Zhuangzi, refused to mourn excessively for his wife after her death, noting that dying was a perfectly natural event. Perhaps dramatic life prolonging technologies will not make our lives better.

Fighting Wars Using Synthetic Soldiers

The main idea behind military technology is to increase effectiveness at beating the enemy while better protecting the lives of the soldiers on your own side. So you’d think that recent—and future—developments in the area of fully mechanized planes and tanks would be a great idea. Perhaps. For sure, if you have fully automated synthetic fighter jets (like the drones currently used, only far more advanced) and automated tanks that can be run by remote control, you could minimize battlefield casualties to your side.

Reducing casualties sounds like a positive change, but don’t get too excited yet. If you don’t see a person directly, it’s easier to do pretty nasty stuff to him without being bothered. When you see your foe, and kill him face to face, you’re fully reminded of the cost of your actions. This immediacy is a check on your behavior. As technology progresses from sword to gun, from gun to missile, from missile to plane, and from plane to fully automated synthetic soldiers, wars will become more distanced from humans and from the military.

By essentially turning war into a video game, you (or a population or the military) may become more calloused and insensitive to the consequences of war, possibly leading to more wars and possibly more brutal wars. It’s an odd trade-off: The safer your soldiers are, the more abstract and distant war becomes. And the more this happens, the more often actual wars occur and the more brutal they become.

Exploring and Terraforming New Worlds

Humanity has always looked upward and wondered about the endless possibilities of other life-forms. No one knows for sure what type of life, if any, is out there, but scientists do believe humanity is unlikely to run into beings who are similar. In reality, humanity is likely to encounter ecosystems that have no exposure to human-like beings and the chemical and bacterial baggage they bring along.

Picturing these systems, which may not even be carbon-based, as having rights is difficult in any ethical sense of the word. Yet it’s also difficult to imagine that terraforming, or destroying those systems to make habitable conditions for humanity, wouldn’t be the loss of something extraordinary. As we contemplate the possibility of expanding into the heavens, some serious ethical thought has to be given to the kind of explorers humans ought to be.

Using Computers to Manage Vital Services

In the last 2,000 years, human civilization has gone from trading posts to Internet stock exchanges. In fact, economies and services these days are growing too complex to be managed by normal human brainpower. Even the best human thinkers couldn’t run a complex national electrical grid or air traffic control system. Short of dramatically simplifying human lives, the only solution seems to be automating large amounts of the world’s infrastructure.

The benefits of automating everything come with the possibility for failure on a massive scale. Even meticulously designed computer systems can encounter errors. And automated systems will have t