Some of the problems of today’s globalized world could be eliminated or reduced by developing operational worldwide molecular design and manufacturing capabilities. Instead of shipping physical objects, their detailed design specification in a “Molecular Description Language” (MDL) will be transmitted over a global data grid evolved from today’s Internet and then physically “printed” by “nano printers” at remote sites. This would allow communities wishing to remain independent to retain their autonomy.
The “Segundas Jornadas sobre Convergencia Ciencia-Tecnología” took place in the University of Alcalá (near Madrid) from 6 to 10 March 2006. On March 9 there was a panel on “TRANSHUMANISMO: UNA VISIÓN ÉTICA DE LA TECNOLOGÍA PARA LA EXTENSIÓN DE LA VIDA” (Transhumanism: an ethical vision of life extension technology) with speakers that included IEET Executive Director James Hughes, IEET Fellow Mike Treder and IEET Board member Giulio Prisco.
The event was very successful, with more than 500 students who listened to the presentations, and asking many passionate questions about how to ensure the safety and universal availability of emerging technologies in the future. Madrid-based Board member Prisco has been receiving letters from students to thank the lecturers for opening their eyes on the human enhancement worldview. One letter says: “until now I viewed our mortal lives as something with a beginning and an end, and nothing more. But now I believe in Man and in his technology, and this gives me hope”. The students in Spain appeared to accept that human enhancement technologies will be developed and deployed, sooner than most people think, and were willing to consider this as a positive or at least acceptable trend. But they want to hear “the rest of the story”: how to solve other, more urgent problems of our world like war, poverty, hunger, public health etc.
Direct from the ‘lack of vision’ department comes S. Jay Olshanksky’s latest offering to the great life extension debate. In collaboration with Daniel Perry, Richard A. Miller and Robert N. Butler, Olshansky has published a piece for The Scientist in which he comes out in favour of life extending interventions.
I don’t normally post overly religious or hyper-conservative arguments that are in opposition to human enhancement (mainly on the grounds that they are far too outside the conversation), but I just caught an article in Christianity Today that I just had to share.
To the extent that it is possible to predict the composition of the future population of the world, I argue that the most likely scenario is that (almost) everyone will choose to adopt technology to live hundreds of years, perhaps indefinitely. Further, ethically speaking, this seems like the best option for our world, for such a world is one where there are higher levels of happiness and achievement.
Death And Anti-Death, Volume 3: Fifty Years After Einstein, One Hundred Fifty Years After KierkegaardCharles Tandy, Ph.D., Editor
Volume Three ISBN-13: 978-0-9743472-6-4
Volume Three ISBN-10: 0-9743472-6-4
Distributed By Ingram
Includes:
“Recent Developments In The Ethics, Science, And Politics Of Life-Extension” by Nick Bostrom
“The Illusiveness Of Immortality” by James J. Hughes
“Universal Superlongevity: Is It Inevitable And Is It Good?” by Mark Walker
At the risk of gross understatement, virtual reality offers enormous transformative potential for individuals and society. That being said, VR’s little brother, augmented reality (AR), will be no slouch either.
For most of human history, the pace of technological development was so slow that a person might be born, live out a full human life and die without having perceived any appreciable change. In those times, worldly affairs appeared to have a cyclical nature. Tribes flourished and languished, bad rulers came and went, empires expanded and fell apart in seemingly never-ending loops of creation and destruction.
To the extent that there was a direction or destination to all this striving, it was commonly thought to lie outside time altogether, in the realm of myth or supernatural intervention. A present day observer, by contrast, expects to see significant technological change within a time span as short as a decade and much less in certain sectors. Yet although the external factors of the human condition have been profoundly transformed and continue to undergo rapid change, the internal factors – our basic biological capacities – have remained more or less constant throughout history.
We still eat, sleep, defecate, fornicate, see, hear, feel, think and age in pretty much the same ways as the contemporaries of Sophocles did. But we may now be approaching a time when this will no longer be so.
To read the rest of this article, click here to download the PDF from Demos.
We all share a desire for self-improvement. Whether through education, work, parenthood or adhering to religious or ethical codes, each of us seeks to become a ‘better human’ in a variety of ways. And for some people, more consumerist pursuits hold the key to self-improvement: working out in the gym, wearing makeup, buying new clothes, or indulging in a spot of cosmetic surgery.
But now a new set of possibilities is opening up. Advances in biotechnology, neuroscience, computing and nanotechnology mean that we are in the early stages of a period of huge technological potential. Within the next 30 years, it may become commonplace to alter the genetic make-up of our children, to insert artificial implants into our bodies, or to radically extend life expectancy.
This collection of essays by leading scientists and commentators explores the implications of human enhancement technologies and asks how citizens and policy-makers should respond.
Okay, I have to admit that I’m a Battlestar Galactica junky. For an American TV show, it’s not half bad and damn entertaining. Sure, it has some ‘eyes roll to the back of your head’ moments, but then again, as a show that attempts to mirror current social and geopolitical issues in the United States, along with obnoxious American attitudes and sentiments, one rolls their eyes to the back of their heads when they read much of today’s news.
A number of technological developments on the horizon, for example, discoveries in genetics (Kenyon, 1996), stem cell research (Shostak, 2002), and the cessation of aging at the cellular level (de Grey, 2005), point toward the possibility that sometime this century the length of the human life span could be radically lengthened. Should utilitarians promote or discourage such research? Let us think of ‘apologism’ as the view that it is wrong to extend the human life span beyond its current limits, and ‘prolongevitism’ as the view that we should seek to extend human life span significantly beyond its current limits.[1] The term ‘significant’ is vague, so for our purposes let us understand it as meaning ‘superlongevity’: an average lifespan of at least 150 years. A life of this length would mean a doubling of our current allotment, that is, approximately 75 “extra years”—years beyond the average human life span (in the developed world). So our question may be rephrased: should utilitarians be apologists or prolongevitists? I hope to show that a strong utilitarian case can be made for prolongevitism. We will use Peter Singer’s apologist paper as a foil: “Research into Aging: Should it be Guided by the Interests of Present Individuals, Future Individuals, or the Species?”[2] Singer argues that prolongevitism will lead to a lowering of aggregate utility. I will argue, to the contrary, that the empirical evidence available does not support Singer’s position; and furthermore, there is reason to suppose that aging populations will tend to become happier on average through a process of self-selection.
When considering ways of preventing a near-earth object (NEO) from striking the Earth, it’s all to easy to suggest that we blow it out of the sky with nukes or other powerful weapons.
In the 1995 anime sci-fi classic, Ghost in the Shell, a futuristic world was envisioned in which cybernetic individuals routinely operate in the virtual world as easily as in the real one. Transhuman cybernetic minds are inextricably connected to the cyber-realm, leaving them vulnerable to attacks.
For moral reasons, we cannot (now or in the future) create robots to replace humans in every undesirable job. At least some of the labour we might hope to avoid will require human-equivalent intelligence. If we make machines with human-equivalent intelligence then we must start thinking about them as our moral equivalents. If they are our moral equivalents then it is prima facie wrong to own them, or design them for the express purpose of doing our labour; for this would be to treat them as slaves, and it is wrong to treat our moral equivalents as slaves.
May this letter find you at peace and prospering! I hope you will forgive me for writing to you out of the blue. Although we have never yet met, we are not complete strangers. We are in a certain sense related. Closely related…
If a brain is duplicated so that there are two brains in identical states, are there then two numerically distinct phenomenal experiences or only one? There are two, I argue, and given computationalism, this has implications for what it is to implement a computation. I then consider what happens when a computation is implemented in a system that either uses unreliable components or possesses varying degrees of parallelism. I show that in some of these cases there can be, in a deep and intriguing sense, a fractional (non-integer) number of qualitatively identical phenomenal experiences. This, in turn, has implications for what lessons one should draw from neural replacement scenarios such as David Chalmer’s “Fading Qualia” thought experiment.
The risk of a doomsday scenario in which high-energy physics experiments trigger the destruction of the Earth has been estimated to be minuscule1. But this may give a false sense of security: the fact that the Earth has survived for so long does not necessarily mean that such disasters are unlikely, because observers are, by definition, in places that have avoided destruction. Here we derive a new upper bound of one per billion years (99.9% confidence level) for the exogenous terminal-catastrophe rate that is free of such selection bias, using calculations based on the relatively late formation time of Earth.
Positions on the ethics of human enhancement technologies can be (crudely) characterized as ranging from transhumanism to bioconservatism. Transhumanists believe that human enhancement technologies should be made widely available, that individuals should have broad discretion over which of these technologies to apply to themselves, and that parents should normally have the right to choose enhancements for their children-to-be. Bioconservatives (whose ranks include such diverse writers as Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama, George Annas, Wesley Smith, Jeremy Rifkin, and Bill McKibben) are generally opposed to the use of technology to modify human nature. A central idea in bioconservativism is that human enhancement technologies will undermine our human dignity. To forestall a slide down the slippery slope towards an ultimately debased ‘posthuman’ state, bioconservatives often argue for broad bans on otherwise promising human enhancements. This paper distinguishes two common fears about the posthuman and argues for the importance of a concept of dignity that is inclusive enough to also apply to many possible posthuman beings. Recognizing the possibility of posthuman dignity undercuts an important objection against human enhancement and removes a distortive double standard from our field of moral vision.
Nick Bostrom, the Chair of the IEET, has been named to head the new The Oxford Future of Humanity Institute (OXFHI), part of Oxford’s new James Martin 21st Century School. OXFHI will assess technologies that have the potential to radically transform the human condition, such as human enhancement medicine, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. OXFHI will also study threats to human survival and global catastrophic risk. Using multi-disciplinary scientific research and ethical analysis, the Institute will seek to identify high-leverage points where a moderate investment could bring enormous benefits for humanity. By confronting big picture issues, the OXFHI will supply an essential background that is missing from contemporary bioethical and biopolitical discussions.
The 21st Century School is James Martin’s second major benefaction to Oxford, following the setting up of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization last year, bringing his total endowment for the benefit of this University to $100m (£60m). The new School will be designed on a ‘hub and spoke’ model, with a Director and small staff at the centre, and a number of institutes each undertaking leading-edge research in its own subject area. At the launch of the School, these will be: the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization; the Environmental Change Institute; the e-Horizons Institute; the Oxford Institute of Ageing; the International Migration Institute; the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute; the Programme on Ethics of the New Biosciences; the Institute for Emergent Infections of Humans; and the Institute for the Future of the Mind.
"Advanced Chess" pitting computer-human teams against each other shows how humans can avoid obsolescence through symbiotic relationships with technology
Several weeks ago, while bored on a commuter train, I decided to pull out my Palm Pilot and play a game of chess. Seeing as I had no one to play against, I decided to try my hand against the computer. I was quite confident that I’d have little difficultly keeping upit’s hardly Deep Blue, after all.
In the wake of the tsunami disaster, The Lancet (Vol 365, January 15, 191-193) has an editorial calling for the creation of a “World Institute for Risk Evaluation” (WIRE), noting that “a piecemeal approach to determining human risks would be an understandably reactive but deeply flawed response to this latest catastrophe.”
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Engineering human evolution
There’s an excellent blog entry on 
IEET Blog