3 Team up with people from the other group. Explain your choice of titles, summarise what you read and discuss possible implications and opportunities for:

– society as a whole;

– you personally;

– your company/family.

Listening

4 Listen to six business people’s opinions on the issues in 3 and compare your views. Choose one extract you like most. Explain why? Speaker 1

Well, part of me thinks this post-human thing is just a lot of nonsense, really. I mean, even if you could genetically alter people to make them stronger or slimmer, well, so what? It’s just like going to the gym and working out, isn’t it? I don’t think we’re going to be creating superhumans for a very long time yet. Si it’s not going to make a whole lot of difference. Erm, and I’ve also read those stories about giving people memory chip implants to make them more intelligent. I suppose it could be done. And it would, in a way, give people an unfair advantage in exams and job interviews and so on. But, I mean, people already have an unfair advantage if they’ve had a better education, haven’t they? So there’s nothing new about buying advantages in life. To be honest with you, they’d have to be able to make me a real genius before I’d let some doctor start doing brain surgery on me!

Speaker 2

Hm, I don’t like the idea of these “new barbarians” living in luxury and controlling all the world’s money, while the rest of us fight it out on the streets. Sounds a bit like that film Blade Runner to me. But, er, we’re definitely seeing businesses getting more and more powerful. I mean, with all the corporate scandals we’ve had recently, I do think that companies are a law unto themselves – they just do what they like, really. So I suppose it’s not too difficult to imagine multimillionaires forcing governments to do pretty much what they want. Er, I am, though, totally against the idea of getting rid of the welfare state. A world in which the fortunate and successful are helped to be even more fortunate and successful and the rest of us are just basically forgotten doesn’t sound like the kind of world I would want to live in.

Speaker 3

Well, on the ageing population idea, I think it’s one of those things everybody knows about but they’re just kind of ignoring it. I mean I read somewhere that half the over-65s who’ve ever lived are alive today! Of course, in one way that’s good because you’ve got all those relatively well-off older people with plenty of time to spend their cash – you know, the so-called “grey dollar.” That’s going to be good for travel and tourism, the leisure industry, and medical and pharmaceutical companies. And, being old might be a lot more fun in the future. What with cosmetic surgery, smart drugs and Viagra we’ll be living it up well into our 80s and 90s! The problem is, we’re going to need millions of young people to run our businesses while we’re all having fun. That means increased immigration from the developing world, I think. Here in Germany we have a population of about 82 million, and seven million of those are immigrants. I think the figure could double at least in the next 20 years.