“The world will someday end with fire or ice, but we await clarification as to the proximate causes. The menu of looming catastrophes is a long one, growing with our advancing knowledge of the universe and powers of self-immolation.”
When—if ever—is it right to choose a policy that will consign certain numbers of a population to a likely death, while presumably giving far greater numbers the opportunity to live a better life?
Traditionally, April 22—Earth Day—is a day devoted to making green accessible to all. It’s a day when each of us is invited to take small, individual steps toward reducing our carbon footprints, limiting our waste, or restoring the environment. See how easy it is—and how fun—to do your part to save the planet? Whether Earth Day does any good, however, is a subject of some real debate.
Most everyone agrees that humanity needs to get rid of its nuclear weapons. There’s no question that complete relinquishment will all but eliminate the threat of deliberate and accidental nuclear war and the ongoing problem of proliferation.
Apocalyptic thinking is frequently found in certain future scenarios, especially when those scenarios are created by people concerned with military conflict, climate change, artificial intelligence, disease outbreaks, or other scary possibilities.
As we prepare for the emergence of the next generation of apocalyptic weapons, it needs to be acknowledged that the world’s democracies are set to face their gravest challenge yet as viable and ongoing political options.
The IEET, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Lifeboat Foundation hosted a meeting on Global Catastrophic Risks on Friday, November 14 in Mountain View, California. Jeriaska generously videotaped and transcribed the talk given by IEET executive director J. Hughes in favor of strengthening transnational governance to mitigate risks.Video and audio of the talk are also available, as are the slides.
IEET friend Annalee Newitz just interviewed IEET Fellow Jamais Cascio in her awesome blog io9.com about Superstruct, Jamais’ awesome new project with the Institute for the Future.
By definition, distant (long-term) problems are those that show their real impact at some point in the not-near future; arbitrarily, we can say five or more years, but many of them won’t have significant effects for decades. Our habit, and the institutions we’ve built, tend to look at long-term problems as more-or-less identical: Something big will happen later. For the most part, we simply wait until the long-term becomes the near-term before we act.
As I see it there are three main categories of risk: bio, nano, and AI/robotics. These man-made risks make up the vast majority of the threat magnitude over the coming century and deserve most of the attention.
Today is the “preview” launch for Superstruct, the massively-multiplayer forecasting game that Jamais Cascio has been working on with the Institute for the Future. All IEET folks will love it.
with co-authors Anders Sandberg and Jason G. Matheny
In the early morning of September 10, the Large Hadron Collider will be tested for the first time amid concern that the device could create a blackhole that will destroy the Earth. If you’re reading this afterwards, the Earth survived. Still, the event provides an opportunity to reflect on the possibility of human extinction. Since 1947, the Bulletin has maintained the Doomsday Clock, which “conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction—the figurative midnight—and monitors the means humankind could use to obliterate itself.” The Clock may have been the first effort to educate the general public about the real possibility of human extinction.
A new pandemic is sweeping the planet. Police fired on secessionist demonstrators in Oregon. The Chinese government is trying (unsuccessfully) to suppress news of eco-terrorists bombing multiple coal-fired power plants. We’re looking at climate refugees numbering in the tens of millions. The human race will go extinct by 2042.
I’m just recovering from the great time we had in Oxford last week talking about the different ways that human civilization might get wiped out, and what to do to prevent that.
Abstract: This article investigates the conceptual distinctions between therapy and various forms of human enhancement. It begins by proposing a typology of human enhancements in order to make more rigorous and grounded discussions about the distinction between therapy and enhancement. Three types of human enhancement are proposed: 1) engineering traits of accepted value, 2) engineering traits of contested value and 3) radical transhuman enhancements. Subsequently, the paper explores the distinctions between the ethical justifications that are advanced for therapeutic interventions, comparing them with human enhancements, concluding that the salient characteristic of health-related suffering enables enhancement to gain legitimacy from the perspective of traditional medical ethics. Finally, the paper considers a number of practical obstructions to the realization of radical transhuman enhancements. Specifically, it discusses procedural obstacles to approving experimental medical research for human enhancements, the likely commercialization of human enhancements that would ensue from their development, and the need to develop experimental medical interventions via animal models.
Recommended Citation
Miah, Andy (2008) “Engineering Greater Resilience or Radical Transhuman Enhancement?,”
Our global civilization is very fragile, and could crumble under the impact of catastrophic events. Wise use of emerging technologies could make our bodies, our communities and our civilization more resilient, or more vulnerable to collapse.
We are approaching a period of perilous geopolitical instability:
when weapons of mass destruction will be more varied, more deadly, more available, cheaper to obtain, and easier to hide;
when the strength (and the ambitions) of regional powers will increase rapidly while the stabilizing might of the U.S. could be in decline;
when new technologies such as genetic engineering, robotics, nanotechnology, and possibly artificial intelligence could enable radical shifts in the balance of power;
and when global climatic conditions —including increased frequency and severity of killer storms, droughts, infrastructure damage, crop failures, and even whole ecosystem collapses—will contribute to growing tensions.
The global situation is becoming a vortex, a maelstrom in which multiple risk factors will swirl and combine to create sudden new crises for which we may not have time to prepare. The act of reaching into the vortex to grab hold of and deal with one problem could send others spinning in new, ever more dangerous directions.
IEET Blog |
email list |
newsletter |
The IEET is a 501(c)3 non-profit, tax-exempt organization registered in the State of Connecticut in the United States.
Contact: Executive Director, Dr. James J. Hughes,
Williams 119, Trinity College, 300 Summit St., Hartford CT
06106 USA
Email: director @ ieet.org phone:
860-297-2376
Watch it Fly and Spy
IEET Blog