Controversial hot topics for the next generation.

SaptaZapta; I actually almost brought up the decline in marriage rates as well. I'm aware of the statistics, but I don't have much personal experience with this occurring in my social groups. Among my friends and family, marriage is still the norm and definitely desired even if there is no religious implications.

Obviously this is not the norm yet, or there wouldn't be an issue at all. But some places in Japan and Europe already have more single-adult households than two-adult ones, and the trend is growing elsewhere, too. In a world where it doesn't take the skills and time of two people to maintain a household, all too many people consider committed partnership to be a burden. Is that good? For whom? I don't know, although its being tied to a rapidly dropping birth rate in Japan is somewhat worrying.

The divorce rate also has a lot to do with the expanding notion of "parents". My parents divorced and then both remarried leaving me with 4 parents and 8 grandparents. I actually consider myself fortunate to have so many people involved in my life (most of the time anyway lol).

Yes, and no. More people involved in your life is nice (if they are nice people, anyway). But more people with legal rights and obligations to you? Not necessarily nice. As it is, with two legal parents, sometimes the courts have a hard time deciding what is in the best interest of the child, when the two parents want different things for him or her. Can you imagine what would happen if 4 legal parents, each pulling their own way, went to court?

The mental ethnic difference is actually an old issue. But I think most of what you're seeing is nurture rather than nature. There's far more variety in brain physiology and chemistry within ethnic groups than there is distinction between them. I think a more poignant question would deal with the history of disenfranchisement of minority groups and the difficulty of breaking the cycle of socio-economic poverty that is actually culturally imbeded in some communities.

Example of an issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_J...telligence
Now, obviously there are very stupid Jews, and there are non-Jewish geniuses. The variance is very high in all humans. But, do Jews on average have a higher intelligence? (Just as men, on average, are taller than women, even though the variance within each gender is much higher than the difference between genders). And if they do, is it of genetic origin?
Neither the original paper nor its rebuttals have done any actual studies of cross-adoption in order to try to verify or rule out a genetic component. Could any institution today fund such a study without being accused of racism? I doubt it.

As for the history of disenfrancisement and so on, that is a different hot issue, definitely. You have those who believe that while discrimination existed in the past, it has mostly been done away with (or even taken too far in the reverse direction), and now it's people's own fault if they keep failing. And you have others who believe that discrimination is still very much around, either directly or indirectly as in the cycle you described.

I could talk about AI for hours, but there's no real prospect of sentience in the near future. Long term though... we'll have to watch out for Skynet.

I'm aware of that. But already today, with very limited AI's, we have people in love with "virtual girlfriends", and we have people treating their iPhone's Siri (and similar tools) as a human assistant - for good and bad. Is there anything wrong with that? Some think so, some don't. The ancient, "go outside and play with real kids instead of watching TV all day" now takes the form of "go outside and play with real friends rather than online ones" and will turn into "go online and play with real kids rather than virtual ones", but the next generation will not listen. What will that do to human society? Remains to be seen.