In my first installment, I began with the question - Who, or what, is a person? - using the Hierarchy of Exclusion from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game novels as a starting point. My purpose in this second section is to expand our circle of inclusion.
The currents of the internet work in odd ways; this past week the theme seems to be robot sex. Since I have had it on the brain, I figure I will contribute to the trendiness and throw my own 2c in.
Will “the self” survive because it can provide people with a greater sense of happiness? Or is it - perhaps along with the constructs “Free Will” and “Determinism” - doomed to the dustbin of history? Should cyborgs, avatars, and a rewired human brain be developed with a stronger or weaker sense of self? An interview with Dr. Garret Merriam, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern Indiana.
Who, or what, is a person? It sounds like a simple question. For most of humankind, a person is a human being; in a Venn diagram, the circles that include the terms Person and Homo Sapiens Sapiens would be identical and would cover precisely the same area. The main problem with this approach is that it places all beings in one of two groups: Persons or property.
Although many today might find the idea of romance with a machine repulsive, experts predict that as the technology advances and robots become more human-like, we will view our silicon creations in a much friendlier light.
In 2009 the Initiative for Science, Society and Policy coined the phrase ‘living technology’ [1] to draw attention to a group of emerging technologies that are useful because they share some of the fundamental properties of living systems. The technologies fell short of being fully ‘alive’ yet they possessed at least some unique characteristics that are usually associated with ‘life’: Self-assembly, self-organization, metabolism, growth and division, purposeful action, adaptive complexity, evolution, and intelligence. Examples of this new field of technology include synthetic biology, attempts to make living systems from scratch in the laboratory [2], ICT systems exhibiting collective and swarm intelligence and robot companions.
An ingenious Russian crow that used a lid as a snowboard to slide down a snowy roof persuaded millions of YouTube viewers that animals are not merely beasts of burden – they also want to have fun. Indeed, the natural world appears to be teeming with creatures enjoying themselves in all kinds of different ways, and wildlife experts even claim that bonobos and dolphins have sex for fun.
After two days of serious neuroscience (Day One, Day Two morning, Day Two afternoon) I confess that my note-taking and summary abilities flagged a bit on the third day.
The IEET is a co-organizer of the Moral Brain conference that started today at New York University. IEET Executive Director J. Hughes, IEET Fellow Wendell Wallach and IEET Affiliate Scholar Patrick Hopkins are speaking on Sunday in the moral enhancement part of the conference, and IEET Managing Director Hank Pellissier and IEET Affiliate Scholar Kyle Munkittrick are blogging. The Friday and Saturday sessions are a review of the last ten years of research on the neuroscience of moral sentiments and decision-making, and were organized by the NYU Center for Bioethics and, Duke Kenan Institute for Ethics. The IEET and Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics organized the moral enhancement panels for Saturday and Sunday, adding the praxis to the science.
Sometimes, the creation is better than its creator. Robots today perform surgeries, shoot people, fly planes, drive cars, replace astronauts, baby-sit kids, build cars, fold laundry, have sex, and can even eat (but not human bodies, the manufacturer insists). They might not always do these tasks well, but they are improving rapidly. In exchange for such irresistible benefits, the Robotic Revolution also demands that we adapt to new risks and responsibilities.
Western Buddhists, taking Asian Buddhism and attempting to shape a modern Buddhism from it, have different challenges and opportunities. For instance, for better or worse, we do not have strong norms to guide the relations of the sexes as in Buddhist countries. Sadly, we must even beware of the sexual abuse of power by Buddhist teachers.
When the Hindu Tantric tradition began to seep into Buddhism, with its complicated sexual yogas and meditation, it had a radical effect on certain Buddhists’ attitude toward women. The earthiness and sensuality attributed to women, which the sexist side of Buddhism saw as their spiritual weakness, became a spiritual power in Tantric Buddhism. The female yogi, “yogini”, who channels her sexual energy into meditation in the midst of the sex act was seen as one of the most important teachers a Tantric monk could have (an idea reflected in Herman Hesse’s novel SIDDHARTHA). For instance, the Tantric master Marpa, and his wife, shared a “long and highly fruitful relationship” with the consort-guruess Da-me-ma, and the Tantrist Savari was taught by two sisters, Logi and Guni, who, As Tantric consorts, helped him to important breakthroughs on his path.
To modern feminists who have grown up in an era of relative sexual freedom it is difficult to understand that till the present virtually the only way a woman could be free of being a sex object for males was to renounce sexuality altogether. As this song from the Therigatha illustrates, the Buddhist teachings helped empower women to cut through the tangle of humiliating sexuality:
I was raised in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, which combines an openness to the wisdom of all faiths, Enlightenment skepticism about the supernatural, and a commitment to liberal and egalitarian political values. When I became a Buddhist (Tibetan originally) and political radical (Yippie, then socialist) in high school I brought along a very UU orientation. I began trying to puzzle out what the relationship could be between my socialist-feminism and Buddhism’s proposals of overcoming suffering through moral and psychological reform, a concern with connecting the micro and macro that I am still working on in various ways.
PETA may have lost its case against Sea World, but it marks an important step forward in the struggle to recognize highly sapient animals as persons. This is not going to happen overnight, and it’s through cases like these that the idea of nonhuman persons will be normalized in society.
Zombies are a strange source of ethical inspiration, but as I mentioned to io9′s Lauren Davis, if academic ethicists get to spend all day talking about trolleys, I see no reason we can’t banter about the ethics of the undead.
“My brain is not like a computer.” The day those words were spoken to me marked a significant milestone for both me and the 6-year-old who uttered them.
Back in October I covered the story of PETA’s intent to sue SeaWorld under U.S. slavery laws. Well, it appears that they’re going to be able to go through with it thanks to U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller who is considering their complaint.
In this piece David Eubanks asks how we might react to intelligence emerging from ubiquitous computing stuff in our environment. What if our imagination about where and how self-willed machine minds will arise is too narrow, and it might just pop up anywhere? What do we owe talking stuff?
I was recently interviewed by Sebastian Alvarez of Wanderlust. We covered such topics as video-gaming pets, the future of nonhuman animals, and cultural uplift. Check it out:
In this second selection of speculative fiction, and excerpt from a forthcoming novel, David Brin asks how we will keep our machine mind progeny loyal.
Humans want to believe that they’re the smartest creatures on the planet. But the more we understand octopuses, the more it seems that we may not be alone in our ability to solve problems, make complex connections between ideas, and survive by wits alone. A growing body of evidence — a lot of it still anecdotal — suggests that octopuses show elements of human-like intelligence.
Contrary to what we’ve been taught, and contrary to what we fervently believe to be true, there is not just one I. We are not individuals; we are hybriduals. Each of us is a compound, collective, hybrid being.
“Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.” – Philip K. Dick
A recently released report by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council in the United States suggests that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should dramatically curtail the use of chimpanzees as research subjects. According to the committee who put together the report, chimps should be used as subjects in biomedical research only under stringent conditions, including the absence of any other suitable model and inability to ethically perform the research on people.
IEET Fellow Patrick Lin has co-edited a new volume, Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics with thirty essays on different aspects on robot ethics, including contributions by IEET Executive Director James Hughes and IEET Fellow Wendell Wallach.
After much hard work, the editor of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Russell Blackford, and IEET Fellow Linda MacDonald Glenn are pleased to announce that the special issue that they have been editing if coming online.
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