Maxwell Mehlman is a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, and author of Wondergenes: Genetic Enhancement and the Future of Society and The Price of Perfection: Individualism and Society in the Era of Biomedical Enhancement. Max is final speaker of the Transforming Humanity conference held this weekend at the University of Pennsylvania by the Center for Inquiry. He is speaking here on Can Humanity Survive Evolutionary Engineering?.
After the exciting bath of left vitriol directed at enhancement and explicitly at my efforts to articulate a technoprogressive approach to enhancement, we turn to a friendly set of papers on neuroethics and biopolitics. (Live-blogging this weekend from the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. You can follow George Dvorsky’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments.)
This morning of the second day of the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, we’re getting a full double barrel blast of bioconservatism from Adrienne Asch as our opening talk. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and mine are below.
We’re now in the first afternoon of the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and I’ll be appending him here as well.
Today George Dvorsky and I are live-blogging from the conference on the ethics of human enhancement, organized by the humanist Center for Inquiry and being held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. We’re in the Biomedical Research building with about fifty people in attendance. You can follow George’s thoughts over at Sentient Developments, and I’ll be appending him here as well.
Over at the Journal of Evolution and Technology we’ve published a new article by Nicholas Agar, in which he summarises some of the argument from his new book, Humanity’s End, which focuses on and critiques the work of Ray Kurzweil, and the IEET’s Nick Bostrom, James Hughes and Aubrey de Grey.
Peter Dickins has penned a provocative article in the Monthly Review: The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End? Dickins approaches the subject of space colonization from a decidedly leftist perspective, and is wonders how the process can unfold without the exploitation of humans and the environment.
The quantified self movement is really starting to gain some steam, mostly on account of a slew of new technologies and services that are making personalized metrics easier and more meaningful. It’s truly a case where the dream is coming true; in short order we will be able to track the most minute details of our body’s functioning, have that data analyzed, and given a set of prescriptions to help us optimize our health based on a predetermined set of goals.
I was recently interviewed by Christian Nesheim of the I Look Forward To blog, who asked: “What will be the single most significant technological development of the next 20 years?”
Lots of fuss these days over Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), particularly as it pertains to women’s health. The disorder, which used to be called Inhibited Sexual Desire Disorder, is in the DSM-III-R and is characterized as a lack or absence of sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity for some period of time. It’s important to note that, for this to be regarded as a disorder, it must cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulties and not be better accounted for by another mental disorder (i.e. depression), a drug (legal or illegal), or some other medical condition.
This is one of the most important and thought-provoking articles I’ve read in the New York Times in quite some time: The Meat Eaters by Rutgers philosopher Jeff McMahan. In the article, McMahan asks the question, “Would the controlled extinction of carnivorous species be a good thing?” His conclusion is yes:
IEET Director George Dvorsky was a featured guest on a recent edition of “The Mark Radio,” talking about transhuman-tech developments we can expect to see in the coming decades.
Slowly but surely, SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is starting to get the picture: if we’re going to find life out there-and that’s a big if-it’s probably not going to be biological.
The ongoing debate between PZ Myers and Ray Kurzweil about reverse engineering the human brain is fairly representative of the same debate that’s been going in futurist circles for quite some time now. And as the Myers/Kurzweil conversation attests, there is little consensus on the best way for us to achieve human-equivalent AI.
Quite a story developing in Chile: the 33 miners who are trapped 700 meters underground will have to wait about four months before they are rescued. That’s obviously not going to be easy on the men who have been trapped for over 18 days already. Keeping it together psychologically, physically and socially for that extent of time will undoubtedly prove challenging.
The ongoing debate between PZ Myers and Ray Kurzweil about reverse engineering the human brain is fairly representative of the same debate that’s been going in futurist circles for quite some time now. And as the Myers/Kurzweil conversation attests, there is little consensus on the best way for us to achieve human-equivalent AI.
(by Milan M Cirković, Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom) We describe a significant practical consequence of taking anthropic biases into account in deriving predictions for rare stochastic catastrophic events. The risks associated with catastrophes such as asteroidal/cometary impacts, supervolcanic episodes, and explosions of supernovae/gamma-ray bursts are based on their observed frequencies. As a result, the frequencies of catastrophes that destroy or are otherwise incompatible with the existence of observers are systematically underestimated. We describe the consequences of this anthropic bias for estimation of catastrophic risks, and suggest some directions for future work. DOI: 10.1111/j.1539-6924.2010.01460.x
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