GM, A.I. and my daughter's birthday

I’ve just ordered a unicorn foal to give to my daughter for her sixth birthday. Not one of those nasty bodge jobs where they graft on an ibex horn in the middle of a horse’s forehead, this is the real thing, gene spliced to perfection.

I can’t wait to see my little girl’s face. Especially when the baby unicorn speaks to her in its cute little voice. OK, the unicorn won’t actually have a proper voice box, it would need a human brain as well to do real speech and I’m not sure I’d want that even if it was legal, which, as we all know, it isn’t.

So they’re installing the latest voice synthesizer plus voice-recognition and speech AI into a jewel-like casing and implanting that on the forehead below the horn. It’ll have wi-fi functionality so the AI and voice can be upgraded as my daughter gets older.

Also, if the AI starts talking complete nonsense, it can be rebooted – I can even send it things to say, which could work out brilliantly if my daughter’s having a hissy fit about having a bath or doing her homework or whatever. Imagine. “I eat grass, you should eat your broccoli.”

There’s a power supply built in somehow, works off the horse’s, sorry, unicorn’s, body heat in some ingenious way.

OK, so it’s all costing me an arm and a leg but it’s going to be worth it when the neighbours see it strutting by. It’ll knock their griffin right off its perch. The stupid thing hasn’t even learnt how to fly, gets a broken leg every time they give it a go.

What's next for human evolution?

The accomplishments of the bioengineering or GM industry have been fairly unspectacular so far. No superfood crops spreading over the Sahara, no fuel-producing carbon super-scrubbers. But it’s early days yet and presumably those things will come.

I’d like to look a little further ahead, to the day when nano-engineering and GM come together to make it feasible to manipulate the genes of living creatures – er, like us – without the need to actually create a whole new generation to see the results.

We’ll be able to change our eye colour, hair colour and skin colour. Have less sweaty feet. Bigger breasts, penises, or both. Better eyesight and better hearing.

Even more interesting, we’ll be able to shop for traits or characteristics presently only enjoyed by non-humans. Hallucinogenic sweat, anyone?

More soberly, given that our environment is likely to change considerably over the next few hundred years, what are the traits that would make the most sense? Here’s my list:

1. A second stomach.

Meat eating is on the way out. Cattle take up too much space, compete for food and biofuel, and produce tons of methane, a greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide can’t even hold a candle to. But our digestive systems aren’t all that good at processing plant food. A second stomach would be an enormous help.

2. Photosynthesis.

With more CO2 in the air, increased desertification and more competition for food, why not just get some of our nutrition straight from the air? All we’d need is chlorophyll in our hair – and an awful lot of hair, a great big shaggy pelt, really – and we’d be truly green.

3. Egg-laying.

Women aren’t going to stand for all this pregnancy nonsense for much longer. Us males are going to have to make a decision: either we undergo modification so that we can shoulder all the morning sickness and backpain ourselves, or come up with a solution that allows a couple to share responsibilities, like penguins.

4. Shorter memories.

Supposedly the natural ageing process will soon be a thing of the past and we’ll all live endlessly – or until we get squashed to death by our ever-multiplying neighbours in about 500 years’ time. Well, if I’m going to live that long, I’d like some hope of wonder and surprise along the way, not just an overwhelming sense of seen-it-all-beforeness. So that goldfish gene that makes every lap around the bowl a voyage of fresh discovery could be quite useful.

Got any more?