Interesting readings. And I do appreciate the effort to bring an optimistic view of our future, along with the transhumanist ideas. Nontheless, sadly I realize that when you look deeper into every situation, you really can get glimpses of zero-sum games everywhere.

Steve Jobs empowered musicians, but he also succeed thanks to his practice of cost externalizing in poor countries (which is nothing new among big corporations). Berners-Lee created the world wide web, and we are exactly now enjoying the benefits of that; but now we are also witnessing a worldwide battle between peoples and governments because this beautiful tool for our communication is also a tool for mass espionage, censorship and absolute control by the biggest groups of power aiming to subjugate the individuals.

The natural tendency of humans to evil (which is as natural as our tendency to goodness) stays within us, no matter how many cultural developments we can materialize. If at the beginning we made wars with sticks and stones, now we make wars with drones and biological weapons... Then what? Yes... maybe Terminator, Matrix, and all those frightening possibilities.

Could we really hope that this feature of our psyches will just disappear with "more development"? Is it really the "development" or its absence the cause of our evil and our goodness?

Sometimes people talk about the past as if it was only a context of misery, pain and evil; but anthropologists have well demonstrated that back then humanity also had many good conditions (for example, many of our illnesses are called "civilization illnesses", because they didn't exist before) despite the lack of many technological means to ease our lives, and we had also, here and there, some good social organizations that didn't mean tyranny.

So, good and evil are two eternal brothers that live in our minds. That's why I think the cyberpunk movement is so accurate in its guesses about our future, because our technological development serves (and will keep serving) to our best motivations, and also to our worst. The oppressive manifestations of our psyches will be implemented through those technological means, and the liberating manifestations will be implemented also by them. Creativity can bring many miracles to us, but also can bring two big atomic bombs over two cities full of civilians.

Thanks Spirajn Senpretend. There are always costs to go along with benefits, and bads to go along with goods. But this doesn't mean they have to be zero-sum. Sometimes, the good can outweigh the bad, even if they both are present.

Oh that's true. And that's exactly the core of the ethical game: to make all our efforts so that the good in every situation (in which we have some responsibility) outweights the bad.