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Democratic TranshumanismJames Hughes, Ph.D.page 2 of 8 Emerging Issues Recently, at John Hopkin's University, ethicists argued that we should never introduce human neurons into chimpanzees and great apes because it would create an ethical anomaly if they start to think and act like human beings. My answer is "So what?" We can create a society in which that is okay and possible, in which a chimp can go to grad school along with everybody else. Another emerging issue is the struggle over the control of reproduction, including contraception and abortion, which we have witnessed. Struggles will soon multiply around genetic testing, germline genetic modification, cloning, sex selection, the intrauterine repair of disabilities, and so on. This leads us to the next issue. Society generally assumes that there is a legitimate distinction between therapy and enhancement. This notion is enshrined in public policy and in what Medicaid and private insurance reimburses for. In the future, it will be very difficult to draw a line between these two kinds of things. I argue that we should not draw any lines between these two. An extra fifty years of life is as valuable from 20 to 70 years old as it is from 70 to 120 years old. Most people do not believe this because they think that they do not want to live past the age of 70, but if we enhance life the way we anticipate, extending life past seventy will be quite attractive and we will begin to see that living to 120 and beyond is an attractive possibility. We see the outlines of this struggle with the conservatism in the social security debate, where people are saying, "What is going to happen if people live even longer than they currently live and use up even more resources?" We have to start thinking in a proactive public policy framework. We do want everyone to live longer; we do want to create an anti-aging Manhattan Project where everybody lives longer. What kind of policies are we going to need in place for when that does happen? The final emerging issue is control over the brain. The cognitive liberty issues that Wrye Sententia[1] addresses are central to emerging biopolitics. The convergence and acceleration of all of these different technologies are bringing these new biopolitical struggles to the fore. Recently, the NSF (National Science Foundation) promoted a recent publication on "Neurovascular Central Nervous Recording Stimulating System Using Nanotechnology Probes." The NSF is embracing a particular model of how we can get nanowires up into the brain and begin to accelerate nano-neural interfaces, which started happening last year when Cyberkinetics began to put chips inside the brains of permanently paralyzed people. Footnotes (back to top) <previous page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 next page> |
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principal struggles are: Who is a citizen with a right to life? Is A.I. something that we are going to enslave, deny any rights to, and keep as a separate part of our society? Are posthumans who upload going to be considered a part of our society?