This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 13th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How the Future Will Unfold Technologically is anyone's guess and someone willing to take plenty of

guesses, is David D. Friedman in his new book, Future Imperfect, Technology and Freedom in

an uncertain world. We spoke following a book forum November 6th.

There are huge risks and huge potential benefits for all manner of innovation and technology. and will be a lot better, but I don't have a lot of confidence in that because one of the points I was

making is that the range of possible variation is very large, and that's even limiting myself

to the technological revolutions that I've thought about and it's entirely possible

that will really change the world is something I've never heard of that comes along

15 years from now. Risk and reward of these various technologies you you made specific note of biotech, nanotech, and

artificial intelligence.

Could you sort of-

Those are the three on my list that could wipe out the human race within well under 100 years in certain ways

they could go but at the same time biotech could result in people no longer dying of old age.

That would be an enormous benefit, especially to those of us who are getting older.

It could result in most people being as happy as quite happy people are.

My casual impression is that while how happy people are partly depends on circumstances

it partly depends on personality and it may well turn out that that's as

simple as the level of neurochemicals.

And I have an example in the book of a friend of mine

who died a few years ago.

And as far as best I can judge, he and his wife were close it was a happy marriage for I don't know 20 or 30 years

...