Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

The exponential increase in the pace of evolution is not really anything new. It has been at an amazing pace that evolutionary change has been increasing practically since the beginning of time. Scientists believe that the process known as evolution started some four billion years ago. At that time, the process of change was so slow that it took about two billion of those years for unicellular organisms to become multicellular organisms. But once that first step was taken, it only took about another 200 million years—a relative blink of an eye—from the birth of the first mammal until the birth of our first ancestor, the first Homo sapiens. Yuval Noah Harari is a scholar who has delved deeply into the possible future that awaits human beings in the technological era. According to his vision, humans are on the verge of seeking to become gods. He refers to this process—as the title of his book indicates—as homo deus . What he means is that as of the 21 st century, the human race ...

In 1984, James Cameron would direct a motion picture destined to become a sci-fi classic. Called The Terminator, and based on a screenplay written by Cameron in collaboration with executive producer Gale Anne Hurd, the movie seemed at the time to be nothing more than a dark, crazy fantasy, an unprecedented tale with no link whatsoever to reality. It was about a future in which artificial intelligence becomes self-aware and decides to eliminate the humans that invented it from the face of the earth. However, with what we know today about technological development, that supposed fantasy has become, in the three decades since the picture was made, visionary and prophetic. More and more futurologists and scientists are predicting that advanced technology will eventually escape from our grasp and begin to govern itself. Linked to that vision of the future is a key idea to the effect that our future destiny will depend in large measure on how we develop and manage advanced techno...