Foreign Policy Magazine has the following interesting idea in the current issue:
When FP first arrived on the scene in 1970, few would have
predicted that, 35 years later, the Soviet Union would have closed up
shop, or that the person handling your customer service requests would
be sitting in Bangalore. In our 35th anniversary issue, we asked 16
leading thinkers to look ahead to which ideas, values, or institutions
that we take for granted may no longer be with us in 2040.
Among the candidates to perish by then are some gimmes such as
Japanese Passivity, the Chinese Communist Party, and the War on Drugs.
One author, however, thinks monogamy will die as “At long last, we will recognize that
it is human to love different people at the same time.” Christopher Hitchens writes an obituary for the euro. And Peter Singer (natch), finds that the sanctity of life will disappear: “We will
understand that even if the life of a human organism begins at conception, the
life of a person?that is, at a minimum, a being with some level of self-awareness?does
not begin so early.”
