The problem that a lot of people refuse to acknowledge or simply haven't thought of is that a very large portion of the world's population is being left out of

The problem that a lot of people refuse to acknowledge or simply haven't thought of is that a very large portion of the world's population is being left out of the debate about whether or not we should even be moving down these techno-futuristic paths. It's just sort of happening based on the desire of a few million nerds. It's not as though people are universally happy about the technological advancements over the past 20 years. Even people within the tech community debate over the woes of information overload, device overuse, increasing reliance on inherently insecure systems, etc, and even then those are debates about what has already come to pass. Questions that are being answered without the feedback of the world at large: Should we create artificial intelligences and allow them to become integral parts of our most critical systems? Should we become increasingly reliant on the Internet, to the point at which ones survival is predicated upon their access to it? Should we create robots in our image to perform the duties humans used to perform and what should the limit to the abilities and sophistication we imbue them be? Should we be mapping the human genome and creating technologies that alter, categorize, and predetermine our genetic makeup? Should we be dedicating significant resources to inhabiting other planets instead of focusing on maintaining the habitability of our own planet? Should we be trying to eradicate all disease and are we aware of the ecological and evolutionary consequences of doing so? Science is great at helping us figure out how to do these things, but it's useless for figuring out whether or not they should be done. Unfortunately, the virtue of science is so over-emphasized in postmodern western culture (especially in universities) that our ability to wrestle with the ethics of our technological advancements has become severely diminished. The institutions that used to provide a significant counterweight to scientific thought are being squeezed out of a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on the systems that scientific endeavors have helped to establish. The wealth, influence, and power in the world is shifting rapidly from religious institutions to scientific ones. The assumption is that this shift is universally good – a move from ignorance to enlightenment – and in a lot of ways this is true. Nobody can deny the benefits the enlightenment has brought to the world. But we're simply trading one set of problems for another. We better able to understand what the physical world is and to be able to bend it to our will, but we are less able to understand the metaphysical world and properly define the way in which we ought to live. We're swinging too far in the other direction when we should be trying to figure out the correct balance between the two.