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.
The above is the motto of the Student Pugwash USA, the student affiliate of the Nobel Peace Prize Winning Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Student Pugwash USA is hosting a series of conferences to help educate science and ethics and in order to make socially responsible sciences the focus of their academic and professional endeavors. The first conference will be in the Midwest region March 31st and April 1st at Purdue University, the focus of which will be the integrity of science and engineering. The keynote speaker will Dr. Arden Bement, Director of the National Science Foundation and leading one of the workshops will Brian Rappert, a British ressearch who will be leading a number of workshops in the US and at home on bioweapons and codes of conduct for biologists.
And since science is in need of more women in the field, we look forward to hearing more!
Scientists have recently discovered that a microbial parasite may be making people schizophrenic. (Link). It seems that the parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, has evolved to live in cats and rats. In cats, it sheds eggs that are eaten by rats. The rats remain perfectly healthy… almost. There is a subtle but important effect: whereas uninfected rats are terrified by the smell of cat urine, infected rats are attracted to it, making them convenient meals for felines, and so the parasite completes its life cycle.
Please join me in welcoming Linda MacDonald Glenn, J.D., LL.M., as the newest IEET fellow.
Linda MacDonald Glenn is a bioethicist, healthcare educator, lecturer, consultant and attorney. Formerly a fellow with the Institute of Ethics of the American Medical Association, and current Women’s Bioethics Project Scholar, Linda Macdonald Glenn’s research encompasses the legal, ethical, and social impact of emerging technologies and evolving notions of personhood.
Linda currently holds faculty appointments at the University Of Vermont College Of Nursing and Health Sciences, Department of Medical Laboratory and Radiation Sciences, and the University of Sciences in Philadelphia, Department of Biomedical Writing.
Linda is on the editorial board of the Journal of Evolution and Technology and is the author of provocative articles such as:
“Biotechnology at the Margins of Personhood: An Evolving Legal Paradigm” Journal of Evolution and Technology, 13(October) October 10, 2003
“A Legal Perspective on Humanity, Personhood, and Species Boundaries” American Journal of Bioethics 3.3 (2003) 27-28 June 10, 2003
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.
On November 5, 2005 Drs. James Hughes (IEET Exec. Dir.), Martine Rothblatt (IEET Advisor), and Aubrey de Grey (IEET Fellow) spoke at the first Immortality Institute conference in Atlanta Georgia. Their powerpoints and video are now online:
Douglas Rushkoff joined RU Sirius on the radio version of his online magazine NeoFiles us to talk about his newest book, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out.
Open Democracy has published a long and positive piece on anti-aging researcher and IEET fellow Aubrey de Grey. Paul Miller is an associate and James Wilsdon is head of science and innovation at the think-tank Demos. They are the editors of Better humans: the politics of human enhancement and life extension, a new collection of essays published by Demos, in association with the Wellcome Trust, on 8 February 2006.
“The man who wants to live forever” Paul Miller & James Wilsdon, Open Democracy, Feb 2, 2006
Aubrey de Grey believes that a 60-year-old alive today may become the first 1,000-year-old human. And he is serious. Paul Miller & James Wilsdon profile a scorned but calmly defiant pioneer of the science of biogerontology….
de Grey is convinced that politicians and policy-makers should think about life extension now rather than later. “Most policymakers get interested in therapies when they’re at the human trial stage. That’s wrong. They need to think about these things when we’re at the mice stage, if not before. Life extension could go from zero to infinity faster than the web. It will have a massive impact on the way that people live and plan their lives. Just think about how tricky it’s going to be to retain people in vital but risky jobs – like the fire service or the army. Everybody’s going to be doing their best to live long enough to live forever.”
In his recent State of the Union message President Bush promoted the hoary old idea of expanding health care access through tax credits. These proposals cannot make coverage universal, nor would they control costs in the U.S.‘s wildy inefficient and unjustifiably expensive health care system.
Fotunately serious health care reformers in the US are rallying to a new (and old) idea: universal health care vouchers that could be used to buy a variety of different kinds of private health insurance plans. I advocate this idea of universal health care vouchers in Citizen Cyborg, inspired by the Clinton health care reform proposal and Ezekiel Emanuel’s book The Ends of Life.. Universal vouchers (a) make coverage universal, (b) ensure that all the plans that people can buy include certain benefits, (c) contol costs through administrative simplification, and (d) allow for radically diverse technological options, depending on the trade-offs that different consumers are willing to make.
For instance, the pro-enhancement plan could gene-tweak you instead of sending you to dieticians and smoking cessation, freeze you instead of torture you with protracted end-of-life treatment, and pay for your limb augmentation or gender reassignment instead of psych counseling. The religious conservatives’ plan would deny you abortion and birth control, and pay for extended care of the brain dead. Everybody’s happy.
In his State of the Union address George Bush called for a ban on cloning, embryo experimentation and human-animal hybridization:
“Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator—and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale.”
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.
R.U. Sirius and Sherry Miller talk with IEET Fellow Wrye Sententia and Richard Glenn Boire from the Center For Cognitive Liberties & Ethics about our right to put whatever we want into our brains and to keep whatever we want out. (Download MP3).
Doug Frauenfelder of Boing Boing interviewed Douglas Rushkoff about his new comic book called Testament, published by vertigo/DC. “The story is set in the near future, in which people in the United States are required by the government to have an RFID tracking chip implanted in their are. At the same time, Rushkoff retells stories from the Old Testament that parallel the near-future story.” Listen to the interview here (20MB MP3). Testament will be a monthly series from Vertigo/DC, is scheduled to premiere in November.
James Lovelock, an independent scientist, author, researcher and environmentalist, has written an OpEd for the Independent Online that is receiving a fair amount of attention. Most famous for proposing and popularizing the Gaia hypothesis (the idea that the Earth functions as a kind of superorganism), Lovelock contends that the Earth’s symptoms are pointing to the blatantly obvious fact that our planet is very, very sick.
A new law specifically targeting nanotechnology could prove necessary to regulate its potential risks and promoting its continued development, experts told UPI’s Nano World.
If global warming results in the “abrupt climate change” scenario of a “little ice age” in the Northern Hemisphere, just how bad might it be? A couple of new studies take a look at the paleogeological evidence to find out.
According to an article over at BBC News, “[r]esearchers from Gothenburg University in Sweden have been studying published data on what makes people happy… They believe working to achieve a goal, rather than attaining it, makes people more satisfied[.]”
I vainly hoped that Leon Kass would retire from the fight over human enhancement after being retired from the President’s Council on Bioethics. But in this piece in the Wall Street Journal he’s still beating the same old drum:
“consider the kind of choices people might make if their biological deadlines were to be extended by decades. How long would our de facto adolescence last? How much longer would we postpone childbearing, if many of us didn’t abandon the business altogether? How would the balance of social energies tilt between the young and the old? Would it not lead (liberals, take note) to an increasingly conservative and perhaps reactionary society? Would not the bulk of human energies turn toward coarse and selfish attempts at self-preservation? ‘There are very few people who’ve been around a long time who see anything with fresh eyes,’ says Dr. Kass. ‘We need to put our weight with the young.’”
As with most of Leon’s much loved musings he leaves it others to figure out the policy implications of his “questions” and “concerns.” What exactly does it mean to “put our weight with the young”? Does it mean grandma doesn’t get antibiotics after 90? Does it mean no FDA approval of life enhancements that take us past 100? I suppose even the Wall Street Journal would balk at such a statist solution, so we are left to just ponder how yucky it would be if everybody got to live longer. Here’s hoping that Ed Pellegrino, the new President’s Council chair, will provide a little less amorphous as a sparring partner in the debate.
Here’s the first bit of the transcript of the 60 Minutes episode that, on January 1, 2006, profiled IEET Fellow Aubrey de Grey and his ideas about anti-aging therapies. Watch the show here
Jan 1, 2006
Scientist Ponders Eternal Youth
(CBS) How’s this for an offer you can’t refuse: how would you like to live say, 400 or 500 years, or even more and all of them in perfect health? It’s both a Utopian and a nightmare scenario but there are those who say it is well within the realm of possibility.
Though we live longer and healthier lives than our grandparents, 100 is more or less the outer limit because, catastrophic disease aside, we just plain wear out. But 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer talked to one scientist who says that’s old-fashioned thinking, that sometime in the next 20 to 30 years or so we’ll be able to recondition ourselves for the first steps towards immortality.
We begin our journey to the outer limits with a gentle trip down the River Cam, floating by that center of British learning, Cambridge University. Our guide and helmsman: Dr. Aubrey de Grey. He ponders while he punts.
“When I was a student, I bought my own punt, a secondhand one for a few hundred pounds. And I used it in the summer to do what’s called chauffeur punting,” says de Grey. “People come along, tourists, and you tell them lies for money.”
Today he’s pondering his favorite premise: eternal youth….
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…
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The Dark Side of Technology
Please join me in welcoming 
Dr. Hughes and Dr. Rothblatt speaking at the Immortality Institute conference November 5, 2005 in Atlanta, Georgia
I vainly hoped that Leon Kass would retire from the fight over human enhancement after being retired from the 
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