Futurism is as much a way of thinking as it is a business process. It’s a recognition that the present has consequences, and that decisions we make now can have unexpected results down the road. Futurism forces us to look at the big picture, the interplay of myriad actions that may not appear related in the moment, but could cross paths in the weeks and years to come. Futurism is most assuredly not prediction; instead, it’s an attempt to inject a bit of wisdom into our choices, be they personal, political, economic or environmental.

At least, that’s what we hope.

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What I find so annoying, or amusing, depending on my mood, about the bioconservative opposition to emerging technologies, such as genetic enhancement, is the moralistic, self-righteous tone. Much of the opposition to emerging technologies depends on an intellectually unacceptable valorisation of the natural, as if smallpox, starvation, and violent death from the fangs and claws of large predators are good things because they are our aspects of our natural condition. We are repeatedly told that there is some mysterious moral worth attaching to the human genome in its currently-evolved state, or to the biological processes of reproduction as we have known them. The prose that emerges from Leon Kass reads as if it should be intoned through the nose (to borrow a phrase from Ezra Pound that was less apt in its original context). To date, any attempt at sensible debate has been almost useless because it just leads to more expressions of smug self-righteousness.

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Morphological freedom designates a right of human beings either to maintain or to modify their own bodies, on their own terms, through informed, nonduressed, consensual recourse to, or refusal of, available remedial or modification medicine.

The politics of morphological freedom is a commitment to the value, standing, and social legibility of the widest possible (and an ever-expanding) variety of desired morphologies and lifeways. More specifically, morphological freedom is an expression of liberal pluralism, secular progressive cosmopolitanism, or (post)humanist multiculturalisms applied to an era disruptive planetary technoscientific change, and especially to the ongoing and palpably upcoming transformation of the understanding of medical practice from one of conventional remedy to one of consensual self-creation, via genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification.

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There are various conclusions we might draw from the recent high-profile doping cases involving Floyd Landis and Justin Gatlin but the obvious one is not that the battle on doping is being won. The logic of public relations requires that anti-doping authorities use high-profile positive tests as evidence of their successes; it is for this reason that we cannot be seduced by their rhetoric.

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Abstract: Recent advances in the technology of creating chimeras have evoked controversy in policy debates. At centre of controversy is the fear that a substantial contribution of human cells or genes in crucial areas of the animal’s body may at some point render the animal more humanlike than any other animals we know today. Authors who have commented on or contributed to policy debates specify that chimeras which would be too humanlike would have an altered moral status and threaten our notion of ‘human dignity’. This setting offers a productive opportunity to test the notion of human dignity and to emphasize some of its weaknesses as an ethical tool. Limiting chimerism experiments on the basis of whether or not it undermines or challenges human dignity implies a clear demarcation of those characteristics which are typically, and importantly, human. Evidence of our evolutionary ties and behavioral similarities with other animals seem to annul all attempts to define the uniquely human properties to which human dignity may be attributed. Hence, it has been suggested that the particular moral status associated with humans cannot be explained for beyond an intuitive basis. In what follows, we will argue that the difficulties inherent in the notion of human dignity lie not in the impossibility to acquire a list of properties which are unique to humans, but rather in the difficulty to demonstrate the moral relevance of these properties, and particularly the relevance of their being human. We offer an alternative interpretation of the concept of dignity which is not necessarily related to being human.

The paper can be downloaded here.

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IEET Fellow’s work and accomplishments were recounted in the North Carolina paper News Observer today.

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Tom Horn is a conservative Christian conspiracist who believes that biotech may be paving the way for the re-creation of angel-human hybrids or “nephilim,” and that Bush is controlled by demons. Horn runs raidersnewupdate.com and his novel The Ahriman Gate is a cross between Left Behind, Stargate, the X-Files and Lovecraft.

Part One   Part Two

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As the potential for enhancement technologies migrates from the theoretical to the practical, a difficult and important decision will be imposed upon human civilization, namely the issue as to whether or not we are morally obligated to biologically enhance nonhuman animals and integrate them into human and posthuman society. Precedents for intra-species cultural uplift abound in human history, providing both sobering and edifying episodes showcasing the possibilities for the instigated and accelerated advancement of technologically delayed societies. As a number of scientists, philosophers and futurists have recently argued, there is mounting evidence in support of the suggestion that these historical episodes are symptomatic of a larger developmental trend, namely the inexorable and steady advancement of intelligence. Civilizational progress necessarily implies increasing levels of organization and refinement across all realms of activity. Consequently, the status of nonhuman species and the biosphere will eventually come under the purview of guided intelligence rather than autonomous processes. That said, a developmental tendency towards uplift does not imply that it is good or right; more properly, it can be argued that uplift scenarios do in fact carry moral currency. Through the application of Rawlsian moral frameworks, and in consideration of the acknowledgement of legally recognized nonhuman persons, it can be shown that the presence of uplift biotechnologies will represent a new primary good and will thus necessitate the inclusion of highly sapient nonhumans into what has traditionally been regarded as human society. In addition to issues of distributive justice, the Rawlsian notion of original position can be used to answer the question of whether or not there is consent to uplift. Finally, it will be shown that the presence of uplift biotechnologies in the absence of the legal recognition of nonhuman persons and a mandate for responsible uplifting will ultimately lead to abuse, adding another important consideration to the uplift imperative.

Download the Complete Document (PDF)

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The image below was taken at Club Neverdie - a private space resort on a virtual asteroid in the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) Entropia Universe. Club Neverdie made headline news when the owner purchased it for 100k US$ (biggest sale of VR estate at that moment). Now the owner wants “to develop it into the Greatest virtual night club in the Universe”. Besides a night club, Club Neverdie has hotels, shops, virtual wildlife hunting grounds in “biodomes”, and many other attractions.

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The first issues of IEET Fellow and well-known author Douglas Rushkoff’s first work in comic book form, a reinterpretation of Biblical stories in a high-tech, philosophically questioning key, are already on sale from DC Comics on collected form. Comic books are perhaps the mass media most attuned to non-mainstream ideas of the future, and Rushkoff’s Testament is one of the most direct and engaging works in this field.

Link

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A Friday afternoon thought experiment.

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The state has a role in regulating the new biotechnologies, but what should that role be?

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RU Sirius talked with IEET Fellow Jamais about his “Participatory Panopticon” concept — how we are increasingly sharing our lives with one another through digital media.

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Here’s Mike Roco, senior adviser for nanotechnology to the US National Science Foundation, on “Nanotechnology’s Future”:

Today nanotechnology is still in a formative phase—not unlike the condition of computer science in the 1960s or biotechnology in the 1980s… Over the next couple of decades, nanotech will evolve through four overlapping stages of industrial prototyping and early commercialization…

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Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and member of the Board of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, said that AI-inspired systems were already integral to many everyday technologies such as internet search engines, bank software for processing transactions and in medical diagnosis. But Bostrom said that traditional “top-down” approaches to AI, in which programmers coded machined to cope with specific situations, were being supplemented by “bottom-up” systems inspired by enhanced understanding of the neural networks of the brain, leading to more subtle forms of AI.

Link to the note
CNN on the Future Summit

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The temperature here hit

100° in the last hour or so; it’s a bit insane to say that this cooling trend is welcome, but when a projected max of 103° is the lowest max temperature in about a week, it’s unfortunately accurate.

108°, well above today’s projected 103°, so never mind that. Heat records are falling all over the place, from the US west coast to Europe. The old saying is that “there are no atheists in foxholes” (arguably subject to dispute); perhaps the new one will be “there are no global warming skeptics in 110° heat.”

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Interview with Michael Cavallaro, author of the dystopian novel Cybernetica, which is about the possibility of pervasive thought control using subliminal cybernetic influence. Followed by news of the use of cannabis as an anti-cancer medicine.

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Debates about future technological developments, and their social acceptance or rejection, frequently involve claims that these developments will challenge equality or that their emergence will be inconsistent with egalitarian political aspirations. Sometimes it is difficult to get clear exactly what argument is being put here.

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Now that George Bush has vetoed a bill rejecting legislation passed by Congress that would have expanded federal research on embryonic stem cells, Americans have been given a taste of what Canadians have had to deal with for the past four years.

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It’s the number one religion (by proportion of adherents) in the states of Washington and Idaho; it’s the number two religion in California, Utah, Massachusetts and Arkansas. In most states, in fact, it ranks as the #2 or #3 belief, and in only a few is it #4 or #5. Nationwide, it ranks #3 overall, just behind Baptist (#2) and Catholic (#1). Yet very few elected officials profess this faith, and a significant plurality of US voters say that they’d never vote for someone who believes this. What is this religion?

It’s no religion at all.

Much to the surprise of both the very religious and the entirely irreligious, non-theism consistently shows up as the second or third most popular belief across most states. According to the American Religious Identification Survey (PDF), assembled by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001, over 14% of US citizens profess themselves to be atheist, agnostic, humanist or secular; this compares to 16% Baptist, and 24.5% Catholic. This map from USA Today shows the breakdown by state (Flash required).

It’s worth remembering this in light of recent statements by Sen. Barack Obama about the importance of religion to the Democratic party. Non-believers aren’t just a tiny fringe element in American society, and they aren’t just found in coastal “blue states.” Non-religious people make up a higher percentage of the populations of Idaho, Montana, and Nevada than they do of those of California, Massachusetts or New York. This isn’t the narrative we’re given by popular culture or media, but it’s reality.

I find this useful info for those of us thinking about the future for this reason: the stories we’re told about how a society works may not match the reality, and we shouldn’t build our models and scenarios based on what we assume to be true.

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A friend and very interesting interlocutor of mine registered the impression earlier this afternoon that I appear to think technoprogressive folks are closer politically and culturally to what he called “environmental primitivists” than to “tech-positive libertarians.”  I am assuming this means folks like John Zerzan on the one hand and Tim May on the other.  Anyway, my friend wondered, “As time passes, and debates get hotter, can we imagine how the opposite might become true?”

The quick answer is simply to say that I personally feel no closer to luddite Deep Ecologists than to libertopian technophiles. Both perspectives seem to me wrongheaded for multiple, but mostly different, reasons.  But I think it is more important to notice that the question has been framed here in a way that virtually ensures any answer that follows will be misleading.

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On The Cyborg and the Yogi (CybYogi) this week (2006-07-15) Matt and I discuss the relationship of science and spirituality, moral reform versus political reform, spiritual soldiering, magic mushrooms and faith healing. The Cyborg and the Yogi is a bi-weekly podcast on the relationship of science and spirituality, focusing especially on neuroscientific research relating to yoga and meditation. CyborgYogi is produced by J. Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and Matthew Falkowski, co-director of Samadhi Yoga Studio in Machester Connecticut.

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IEET Fellow Linda Macdonald Glenn interviewed a number of the participants at the Albany conference on Bioethics and Politics, and made the podcasts available here.

Especially recommended is Alta Charo ‘s “Age of Endarkenment” lecture

You can also hear interviews with IEET Exec. Director J. Hughes, Nigel Cameron, Jonathan Moreno, Eric Cohen, Glenn McGee, and Art Caplan.

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An article that appeared last week in AlterNet, written by Traci Hukill, sounded a strong warning about the prospect of laboratory-produced “cultured meat” substitutes to animal corpses as food, and the piece has attracted widespread attention.  As a longtime ethical vegetarian who has written on this topic before, Hukill’s piece certainly attracted my own attention.

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John Horgan is a science journalist at Stevens Institute of Technology, and author of Rational Mysticism, The End of Science, and The Undiscovered Mind. His blog is “The Scientific Curmudgeon.” We talked about the scientific approach to mysticism and transhumanist technohype.

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In 1995 US President Clinton appointed 18 professional bioethicists to a National Bioethics Advisory Commission to advise him on research ethics. After the announcement of Dolly the sheep having been cloned in 1997 the NBAC was asked propose cloning policy. The NBAC advised that the NSF/NIH should fund therapeutic stem cloning but that there should be a five year moratorium on reproductive cloning research because it was still too unsafe for human subjects. (In fact, it is still too unsafe for human subjects). The NBAC expired in 2001.

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If scenario creation was the poster-boy for futurism in the mid-1990s, artifact creation looks to play that role for mid-2000s futurism. Combining strategic foresight with what amounts to concept-car design, efforts such as the Institute for the Future’s “Artifacts from the Future” and Management Innovation Group‘s “Tangible Futures” seek to give clients a sense of what tomorrow might hold through the use of physically (or at least visually) instantiated objects. These objects make up in conceptual weight what they may lack in detailed context; holding a fruit carrying a label showing the various pharmacological products added to its DNA is far more arresting than reading a story about big pharma taking over big farmers, let alone a simple listing of this development as a possibility.

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Dr. Hughes is quoted in today’s Christian Science Monitor article on the legacy of Dolly the cloned sheep:

The goal of cloning early-stage human embryos to produce stem cells for use in research, and eventually to treat diseases, is likely to remain controversial. Those who see this research as destroying human life and those who do not regard these blastocysts (embryos in their very early stages) as human life have found little middle ground.

The battle is between “those who see this as the first step to a Brave New World and those of us who see this as a legitimate ... step toward regenerative medicine and all the benefits that can accrue” from that, says James Hughes, a sociologist and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Hartford, Conn. The group promotes the use of biotechnology to expand human capacities.

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Last week, I participated in an nanotech conference [PDF] in Zurich, Switzerland, sponsored by the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC). We reviewed a white paper [PDF] on risk governance of nanotechnology, deliberated in breakout groups, and heard some excellent speakers.

Following are some comments on notes I took during the two-day conference.

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“Size Does Matter”—So says the cover of a special issue [PDF] Friends of the Earth magazine devoted to nanotechnology.

Among the important questions they ask are:

• Is it acceptable to attempt to remake the world from the atom up?
  
• Whose interests is nanotechnology being developed in, and for what purpose?
  
• Who bears the risks and who will receive the profits?
  
• What would the ability to produce atomically precise manufactured goods from a home nano-factory mean for global trade and labour markets?
  
• When considering the question of what a future nano world would look like, it is critical to go beyond the rhetoric of the nano optimists and ask first who controls this emerging powerful new technology, for what purposes is it being developed, and in whose interests is it being managed?

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