We love technology but some of it will go wrong. Some aspects might even get out of control, says Kevin Kelly.

I don’t worry about most new inventions, but there are four technologies I think are worth worrying about. These are the emerging technologies of geno-, robo-, info-, nano- stuff. Geno includes gene warfare, gene therapies, and drastic genetically modified organisms, and drastic genetic engineering of the human line. Robo is of course robots. Info concerns digital intrusions, artificial minds, cyberware, and virtual personas built from data accumulation. Nano are super tiny machines as small as bacteria that do all kinds of things, sort of like dry life. The initials of these four worries are combined into the ironic acronym of GRIN. The common element among the techniques of GRIN – and the reason they are worrisome – is that they are all self-reproducing…

No-one summarises the scale of the information age change as well as Kelly, and for me nobody states the moral challenge we face as clearly. He once spent many months living with the Amish to understand how religion affected their policy on technology, and describes himself as a “blue-state Christian”.

The GRINs are bullying, rogue technologies, he says. To handle them we’ll need the analogy of parents that discipline unruly children:

If we can train our children – who are the ultimate power-hungry autonomous generational rogue beings — to be better than ourselves, then we can train our GRINs.Like raising our children the real question – and disagreement – lies in what values do we want to transmit over generations?