An issue I've been dealing with forever on my mbp 2013 is the machine just pausing input for 2-4 secs (video and audio don't hitch, just keyboard/mouse input).
I recently took the trouble to completely wipe the disk and reinstall macos mojave and it's still happening so it's not due to cruft installed over time in OSX. I dunno. I'll deal with it until it gives up the ghost and probably move to a windows machine with the work they're putting into WSL2
One thing I wish you could do is have two different copies of an input - in my case, I wanted a video stream input (webcam) where I apply one set of filters to it for one scene, and a different set of filters to another scene. Seems like filters are globally applied to the instance, and you can't have two different scene elements with the same video input device.
My point is, people's minds aren't caught up to the scale of data, and I don't think there is a technology solution for it. We now have more data and more technology but it's not solving the problem.
Hell I don't always know where I'm going to put all the groceries I take home.
EDIT - to add - too much data isn't really useful. When we are talking personal data collection it's basically a librarian's job, which is non-trivial
Pretend we didn't have computers and people wanted to store all the facts in their lives - how many people could manage a library / filing system rich enough to catalog the level of information we're expecting to keep here?
FF is significantly better on OSX battery than it was in the past (since v70 I believe).. however Safari is still king. I never fire up Chrome anymore on my Macbook
I like you analogy if in your story, the inventors of CRISPR can exert some sort of power or control over the actors who are engineering a super-virus and thus make a moral decision to do so or not