Scientific Progress & Man Made Horrors Beyond Comprehension

     If we actually compress a century of scientific progress into a decade, we are likely to cross boundaries very rapidly toward man made horrors beyond comprehension. Current roadblocks to scary things (like vascularization as a barrier to wide-spread brain farming), will be shattered in a matter of months or years. Regardless, this progress will be way ahead of schedule, and without ethical frameworks in place for most new technologies. If you believe this, as I do, the moral imperative becomes thinking through what things are likely to be unblocked with additional scientific progress, and which of those things is the scariest. I think commercial biocomputing is clearly the answer here. Maybe we grow a "brain the size of a Costco", or we decentralize biological neurons, but regardless, the questions about consciousness will have been totally unresolved at that point. We may break barriers in our understanding of consciousness along with this scientific explosion, but I am worried that the ethical and institutional frameworks will lag decades, and in this case centuries, behind.