Farsight

Many years ago I read a comic that dealt with transhumanism, the future, and what we would become as people - the comic itself was loud, violent, full of sex and gore and, well, funny in a very dark way. However, it wasn't wrong. People are stupid and blind and the potential future is getting more and more strange and dangerous each day.
So what can we do? Why not map out the possibilities?
In Transmetropolitan, there was a....seal off community known as "Farsight". It dealt with the future before it happened - happily dealing with new technology that could be deadly or dangerous before it went out into the public - checking on social ramifications, doing interpersonal experiments and so on before they came to fruition - what if we could do something similar now? Do social experiments of a futuristic nature? The whole point of science fiction is to ask "What if?"
What if mutants developed super powers?
What if aliens landed?
What if people has wiring in their brains that let them communicate without talking?
What is sex and gender were so maleable as to not mean anything any more?
What if we could clone ourselves infinitely and never die?
These are big questions - and ones that are quickly becoming more and more relevant today - what if we didn't need to pay for anything? What if energy was free? What if the entire population never had to work? What if currency became obsolete? How would we get ahead in life? What would we do?

At first glance these options seem amazing, and wonderful....but just look around at what we have done with the future tech we carry each and every day; we use the internet - an infinite source of information - to yell obscenities at people a continent away or watch videos of people getting hurt or of kittens being cute. We use phones - hand held computers more powerful than anything we had even 20 years ago - to take selfies and take photos of our food. We use drones for the most mundane and stupid tasks and we use VR to just be frankly weird at each other or experience jump scares.
Have we no ambition? Have we no real purpose or drive any more? Did we ever?

The point is....what if? What if we could run these social experiments first - put people together in a Larp-like cyberpunk situation and see just where it goes and how far they take it.

What if? We'll see....