With the integration of human beings and technological enhancement, the ideal of what is morally just becomes increasingly ambiguous, referencing the seemingly endless scenarios of mechanical, electrical, and bio engineering enhancements that have propelled individuals of our kind to mature well beyond the centennial of exploration.
Scientific American reports about research at Cornell’s Computational Synthesis Laboratory intended to give robot minds a degree of “self-awareness.” Is this a signpost on the road to machine consciousness?
A number of years ago I visited Sea World in Orlando, Florida. The experience proved to be a formative one, as it would mark the last time I would ever visit an aquatic theme park.
My initial reaction to reading about IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer and software was a big fat ho-hum. OK, I figured, a program that plays Jeopardy! may be impressive to Joe Blow in the street, but I’m an AI guru so I know pretty much exactly what kind of specialized trickery they’re using under the hood. It’s not really a high-level mind, just a fancy database lookup system.
The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies has announced a new program, Rights of Non-Human Persons, that will argue in favor of applying human-level rights to certain other species.
Imagine an artificial being, granted the rights of humans but without a limited lifespan, that would have the ability to gather resources to itself indefinitely.
Asked when, if ever, a robot would deserve ‘human’ rights, respondents to a recently concluded poll of our readers showed dissatisfaction with the range of answers we offered. Almost 22% gave their own answers, and another 10% said they weren’t sure.
It can’t be. Even a so-called “identical twin” is not an identical twin. Even if one’s DNA is the same as another person, as with identical twins, there are differences in terms of when particular genes within that DNA are turned on and off.
Virtually all talk of cognitive enhancement focuses exclusively on the enhancement of individual intelligence. But what about enhancing group intelligence?
When my daughter was about five years old, her mother and I took her to see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. She was deeply affected by the scene in which the cute little creature nearly dies.
It is natural to feel that software development will never get things right. We all feel frustrated by software that doesn’t work as it should. People in industry are constantly bemoaning the lateness and incompleteness of software projects. But the facts are better than they seem, and are improving rapidly.
There is good reason for thinking that posthumans will, on the whole, be atheists. And there is good reason for thinking that widespread apostasy would, on the whole, be desirable.
What are the current unresolved issues in transhumanist thought? Which of these issues are peculiar to transhumanist philosophy and the transhumanist movement, and which are more actually general problems of Enlightenment thought? Which of these are simply inevitable differences of opinion among the more or less like-minded, and which need decisive resolution to avoid tragic errors of the past?
How is gay marriage in America proceeding down the aisle? This question concerns all transhumanists because persecution of homosexuality is an anti-Enlightenment human rights violation that is rooted in archaic religious superstition and anti-scientific thought. Actively supporting gay marriage is the ethically responsible position for all progressive transhumanists.
Could it be that there is no intelligence without a body? That there’s only computation? That cognition is the byproduct of biological processes, and never the driver of them?
Traditional values of looking at gender in binary fashion grow less and less important as scientists show that gender identity is diverse in nature and is caused by many biological and social conditions.
Humanity is devoting some of its best minds, from a wide diversity of fields, to helping software achieve consciousness. The quest is not especially difficult as it is a capability that can be intelligently designed; there is no need to wait for it to naturally evolve.
British biologist Robert Edwards, who developed the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), has won a Nobel Prize. But the Vatican says the choice of Professor Edwards was “completely out of order.”
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.)
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.
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