2 ideas about futurist thought

I am a huge fan of all things projective into the future, and I really am not opinionated as to what's necessarily good/better/best... obviously, dystopian global slavery sucks, but there is a huge pallete of other potential choices.

I am particulartly interested in the transhumanist stream, where people, AI's, advanced biotech, gentech, and robotics all merge and interplay in different ways to create a new species... again, I can see both good and bad directions in this.

I'd like to throw out two concepts that I think of as guiding principles for thinking about the future:

1. Anything that people can do, they will do, somewhere, eventually. Very rarely have people ever not taken a bite of the apple, given the chance. One of the few examples is Japan outlawing guns, because they thought hacking each other up with swords was way cooler. Also, there was something about keeping it all in the family with the warrior caste, and not letting a lot of peasant foot soldiers blow the nobility away. Obviously that didn't last too long.

2. 'Mindset' (or attitude) is the real driving force that leads development in particular directions. This one is a little difficult to explain, but I beleive in this very strongly. What might our world look like, what would our technology look like, if it had been driven by something other than a 'this year's shinier iPod/lexus/laptop/mcmansion' mindset? What if our cultures goal was not to create devices that subvert a person's will in an addictive way, but what if that energy was directed in some other manner? It's kind of along the lines of that quote from the Dalai Lama where he says that the button you push is not really the trigger of the nuclear weapon, but the actual mindset of hate is the real trigger.