#3 - Yuval Noah Harari Wrote:Stalin worked mainly with social engineering. He dreamed about creating a new man -- a new human, the ideal Soviet or communist citizen. He maybe wanted to re-engineer human biology, but he couldn't. He only had social engineering in the end.

[...] In the 21st century a new Stalin might have the ability first to truly re-engineer the body down to the level of DNA and create new human species and perhaps even to create completely inorganic life forms. So we can imagine millions of years of a new evolutionary track beginning with some 21st-century Stalin. And this is extremely frightening, especially because these kinds of people think in extremes.

I talk a lot with scientists who are developing these technologies [...] and most of them think not only in beneficial terms, but also in very narrow terms. Like "I'm doing my research to help cure Parkinson's disease". They think it's a limp imagination to worry about what the worst politician on Earth would do with the technology that they're developing.

But as a historian rather than as a biologist -- or as a computer scientist -- this is the way my mind thinks in response to that...