Summary:
Genetic Engineering may soon provide treatments if not outright cures for most diseases; and nanotechnology and nanomedicine can address more ills. Together they can significantly extend the average life span and improve the quality of our lives. The 21st century technologies are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication. I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals (Joy 242).