We are animals. Yet we are characterized by our brain and our ability to use information. We are not rational. We are driven by emotions to satisfy the needs of an animal. Our intelligence is a tool used to accomplish that satisfaction. Our words and our intellectual concepts of self are slanted to see ourselves as minds above the animal struggle.
We do not want to be animals. We want to be intellects while ignoring our emotions of fear and desire. The world is a mess because we are animals, with animal passions, and our needs are emotional, not rational.
Now, let’s mix in the most powerful technology the world has ever known. How many of these animals will be alive a hundred years after the nanofactory is in production? Will we have the functional world of Star Trek or a paranoid military state of nanorobot delivery vehicles and nano defense systems in a constant war to remove the threat of the other group?
Why would you think the emotion in the world today will go away because we have new toys to play with? The toys will be used to support the animal emotions just like the atom bomb and the Abrams tank support the fear that drove us into Iraq. Just as they supported our fear of communism forty years before in Viet Nam. It is obvious that one generation was unable to pass on ANY wisdom it accumulated from the Viet Nam mistake to prevent us from doing something exactly like it in Iraq. All our talk, all our intellectual study of what went wrong in Viet Nam was unable to affect our administration to keep us out of Iraq. Two different men, both of whom have to learn the same lessons on their own watch.
We have certainly stirred up the world against us ( Americans ). We have made a rich garden for our fears and we have raised up a monster in the thousands of young men who get their personal meaning in life from the fight against the Western Satan.
Unless this animal learns a different way of behaving, or finds a tool for human rationality to raise him above his animal origins into the true realm of rationality, this tiny ball of mud is going to have a house cleaning in the next fifty years and few if any of the human animals will be alive to see 2107. Maybe our true descendants will be computers because they will be the first generation with self editing capability. If an emotional response is a problem, they will modify it until it is not a problem.