If we’re going to have parts of the world sectioned off to allow for unfettered technological experimentation, then we’re going to need to seal them off and deny the rest of the world access to that tech for some period of time. Speeding things up in some places means slowing things down everywhere else.
After all, if the purpose of these zones would be to try things out and take risks to figure out their effects on society, then we need to prevent those things from getting out into the wild, in case the effect they have is bad. This suggests a global model of technological adoption that’s more like theAmish system.
Make no mistake, some of the experiments will go bad. If they don’t, then the experiments weren’t really all that experimental.
People will die. Dedication to the idea of communities that are free to go down rabbit holes and dead ends to see if there’s something valuable there means a dedication to allowing some of those groups to wipe themselves out. What do you do when your futurenauts end their period of experimentation maimed and traumatized because of a rampaging biotech project? How do you quarantine a group of people pushing the limits of the nuclear lifestyle?
Worse yet, what if things go well? What do you do when one of your experimentation communities cures AIDS (or seems to have) ahead of schedule. Do you let that tech back out into the world? What’s the procedure for evaluation and release? How long does the next Facebook have to stay isolated and in testing before we allow it access to the first billion users?
Journal of a Cosmic Anthropologist 