We don't know how that will play out, just like we didn't know how the microprocessor would play out (scifi fell flat on its face there). But it will change everything.
In the 1960's we were at the top of the curve for transportation technology, with space travel happening for the first time. In one lifetime people had gone from steam trains + horses to jet aircraft and humans landing on the moon. So if you look at the narratives of the time, it was that we would soon have flying cars, moon colonies, the future would be "the Jetsons." Meanwhile people did not anticipate the telecommunication and computing revolutions that were just over the horizon. Watch 2001 and one of the characters takes a commercial flight to the moon on a Pan-Am spaceship, but then makes a (video) phone call from a pay phone booth on the ship. WOW!
I think today we are in the same space on the computer revolution. Our sci-fi stores today tend toward either magical or dystopian AI, androids, etc. Ready Player One, etc. But really, the next great surge is biotech. What if we could develop biological products in the same way we develop electronic products? Who can even imagine what good and bad things that would bring about, and how profoundly the world around us could change?
I think there's a great chance that young adults today will have a life experience much like people born around 1900 did - that someday our grandchildren will ask us what life was like and our childhood without (biotech revolution) will sound as impossibly antiquated to them as life without cell phones and the internet sounds to children today.
> But really, the next great surge is biotech.
> Who can even imagine what good and bad things that would bring about, and how profoundly the world around us could change?
The immediate potential for biotech is in disease prevention and cure, and to a limited degree, lifespan extension. Cures for diabetes, obesity, dementia, hypertension, COPD, cardiovascular disease, congenital and genetic disorders, various cancers. Possibly even regrowing organs.
Cures (and better management) of any or all of these would be life-changing for the sufferers. Of course it has to be attempted.
The macro effect on society would be to increase lifespan, and therefore the proportion of old people. Old people tend to be socially conservative, they have all the money, and they vote more than younger people do. Wealthy people obsess about loss and risk avoidance.
I foresee an ossification, rule by methuselahs. So life would change less quickly than it does now. NIMBY on steroids.
There would be huge shortages of nursing homes, care workers, early bird dinner spots, seniors cruises, etc. (sorry, had to throw some jokes in there). Social security benefits would collapse. Retirement age would absolutely have to change, or we'd simply have massive unemployment (imagine if people lived to 120 but couldn't find work for the last 50-60 years of their life).
Thinking about voting preferences is really just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Society would either collapse or see massive shifts simply due to physical needs, well before voting preferences became the dominant factor.
For example, vastly more efficient food production. Imagine meat being grown in a petri dish. It would use far, far less resources. The nutritional value could be enhanced. It could taste like the best beef.
This is a form of programming that makes what we currently do look like bashing rocks together.