With regards to designer babies we are probably entering an age of designer biology. This means designer crops, animals, diseases and so forth. I suspect it will not be too long that subtle forms of bio-warfare will be conducted. For example company A has a product that they intend to release in six weeks, but company B has a competing product that might take more of the market. Company A then crafts up a sickness that targets company B employees, this delays company B from making their release and ... . Don't worry about computer viruses, designer bio-viruses are coming. Indeed for a few thousand dollars and a bit of knowledge anyone can clone genes into organisms. I suspect new designer crops are coming, in particular in the light of global warming. I expect in a couple of decades that there may be biological teddy bears; animals that remain in an immature form, that have features similar to teddy bears and that are genetically designed. I expect to see bio-implants of new neurons into the brain, neuro-cybernet links are coming, eg BCI technology, cloned bodies and so forth. I would not be too surprised if within 50 years people can replace their aging bodies with newly cloned bodies their brain is transferred into.
I would not be surprised to see golem type of bio-engineering as well. This may involve cloning up human bodies with computers running the body. This might prove interesting for various types of work, and it could also provide sexual pleasures without the messy problem of trying to maintain a relationship. Marriage is a dying institution and I think relationships are probably going to just be short term affairs. As our world becomes more complex it appears that holding down relationships is increasingly difficult. Cyborg sex buddies might become more of the norm as relationships become too difficult for most people to uphold.
The rearing of children will probably become more institutional, where I would not be too surprised to see corporations devoted to designing and rearing children. Women already earn money by carrying such babies to term, and I would not be surprised if this becomes wider and more prevalent. I have even heard that with a bit of bio-engineering men might be able to do the same. This will then transition into the completely cloned uterus cyborg that is dedicated to justating babies. This will be a uterus that is cloned up and maintained with other bio-supports and computerized controls. As I suspect the 21st century will see corporations emerge as the primary power in the world, such babies will be produced, packaged and marketed for a profit.
The future world is then going to be a sort of shock-punk reality that removes more and more barriers and limits to freedom of power. It will not be a utopian world of course, and I suspect it will have a bit of a dystopian dissonance to it. However, it may not be all that bad, well except for the constant concern over designer diseases and the like. It will also probably see humanity project itself into a virtual world or matrix through neural-cybernetic links, where each of us increasingly escapes the physical world. The question is really how many decades will it be before brains are the main nodes of the internet.
This is some general sense is how I see the future world, and I actually thought about writing on this. However, this involves prognostications that are probably at best coarse grained and could be wrong in some instances. Where the future goes or is steered is not going to be based on any grand scheme, plan, dream and so forth. The future will entirely emerge on the basis of money and what gives the highest shareholder return to investors. From that I suspect bio-technology, computer generated reality, cybernet-neural links and such will probably become a prevalent aspect of our future. It will also mean that everything we think of now as normal will dissolve into a witch's brew of cyberpunk shock wave bewilderment.
LC
