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The Not-Quite-Human Rights Movement
An anonymous reader writes "Yale University hosted a conference on transhumanism which organizers say served to
coalesce transhumanism from a subculture to a 'movement.' They're even sketching out where the role of violence becomes legitimate in the quest to become a cyborg.
But most of the talk was of peaceful integration and continuation of democratic values."
What these bioethics departments should be doing is trying to convince people that stem cell research is one of our best chances at curing many diseases. That's a much more important goal than trying to make sure society won't turn away when they see me and my robot walking hand in hand down the street.
Yes, we should be doing stem cell research! (Although, I doubt this will be an unpopular opinion here. Slashdot does attract many scientists, after all.)
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
I think this is quite similar to the Segway, aren't we jumping the gun a bit? Trying to enact legislation before this even becomes widespread?
It is great to discuss this sort of stuff in groups and think about what they could do in the future, but to seriously believe that they would need to make sure laws could handle this before anymore than a handful of people are "cyborgs" (there is only one person that I know of that has actual shit inplanted in his body)?
It seems a little excessive. Maybe as implants begin to become more commonplace (I can't see this happening for at least 15-20 years) we should start thinking about it, but until then, how about we try to enact useful legislation (re-opening our freedoms, ending the corporate stranglehold on consumers, forcing competition in corporate markets, etc).
Yay for timewasters!
Not until we resolve the issue of rights for other species.
We tend to measure the value of other lifeforms in terms of their genetic closeness to ourselves. All humans share something like 99.9% of their genes... and we already have a hard time fighting for the rights of distant strangers who are in fact members of our large but interbred human family.
Then how about our genetic relations, our sibling and cousin species, from chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utangs out to other primates, then to other mammals, then birds, reptiles, fish, then insects and even down to single-celled organisms, with whom we still share an impressive number of genes. All still much closer to us in any meaningful sense than even the most human-looking cyborb.
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From the article: "I would say if a creature is both sentient and intelligent, and has a moral sense," ... it is human.
But these are all terms designed specifically to separate the non-human animals from the human ones. Pure circularity. My cat is sentinent, and intelligent. As for her moral sense, if I could identify such a thing in myself, I'm sure I'd ascribe the same motivations to her.
But does that make my cat 'human'? Nope. Human is someone who looks and talks like me and has enough of my genes that we can (if we were of the right ages and genders) fuck like bunnies and make more humans.
Why do philosophers try so hard to identify the unique "humaness" of our species when it's such a simple thing...? Humans are animals that had human parents, and no amount of postulation or terminology will make a cat or a machine into a human.
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You think english verb conjugations are difficult? You don't speak any latin language, do you?
what's really depressing is how that this transhumanist version of a bionic man sacrifices lots of his human body (presumably some major organs and skeletal muscles) - but the artist can't let go of the damn penis. our cyborg progeny will have a totally artificial endocrine system, but fully-functional man meat.
won't sexual reproduction be passe in this crazy borgified world-gone-mad?
Maybe they should worry about shorter-term concepts like social ramifications of bioengineered replacement organs or the social impact of PDAs and smartphones rather than far-fetched technologies such as mind transferrance and sentient* AI.
(* the definition of 'sentience' is still up for debate)
As for building the next generation of super-cyborgs, you'd obviously use rational thought rather than randomly shaking a bag of traits and seeing what comes out
Dear me, no. Eugenics (which is exactly what you're describing) is a foolish endeavor. The computational power to adapt to all possibilities is far too large; redundancy and variation are the keys to survival.
Rational thought only needs to enter into reproduction to ensure sufficient saftey and material, to educate the next generation, and to excise the most undesriable of traits. (That's were capital punishment comes from--getting the worst bits of humanity out of the gene pool.)
Absolutely right. They get together to discuss something like this because it makes them "feel" better. The problem they are focused on is so far down the road that even our great-great-grandchildren won't have to deal with it.
But, I guess the main reason they go ahead and discuss the problem is that, in their minds, they are on the "cutting edge" and thus are superior to the rest of us common folk.
By definition it is very hard for people who are full of shit to realize that they are full of shit.
I know this is going down another road, but..
First, the black thing is no longer about slavery, but because mom and dad were prejudice, and that has rubbed off on the kids (although should be worn down over time or even eradicated). there hasn't been a slave for a long time now...
The fear of cyborgs will be more of a fear of what one does not understand
Linux: Helping nerds look smarter since the late 90s.
How do you know you aren't subject to the same constraints? (People used to argue that Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem somehow showed AI to be impossible, but OTOH "Anonymous Coward cannot consistently assert this proposition" is clearly true and you can't assert it, despite your supposed superiority.) Humans are systems, too, and eventually we'll figure out how we work. If things go as they have in the past, the simplicity of the underlying mechanism should be breathtaking--and humans will be no less impressive, or deserving of ethical treatment, for that simplicity.
That's not really true. Even after your mother goes through menopause, she will still take care of you and help you out in the (evolutionary) interest of maintaining and propagating her genes. Even after she can no longer have children she can still play a role in ensuring the survival of her already born children. And since a person can only help others (their offspring, relatives) if they are healthy enough to help themselves, surely evolution does care about the old man (or woman) who becomes infirm.
English is a lot more complex than you give it credit for. Most verbs have three 'conjugations', actually - four if you count third person singular. Some have more. In some, two of them are the same, but by no means in all.
Also, I was going to craft an example that showed English does have a past future tense, but then realised it would be redundant, since I've just used one.
And English gets a lot more complex than that. I would have been going to illustrate that, but I was unable to come up with a good example that didn't sound convoluted. Oh, wait a minute, there's a conditional pluperfect past continuous future (or something like that) right now...
English's use of the verbs 'to be', 'to do', 'to have' and 'to go' as auxiliaries, plus its 'will', 'would', 'shall' and 'should' semi-modals, combine with the three 'conjugations' - the pretirite, past participle and present participle (gerund) of verbs ('went', 'gone', 'going' for example) - to make some tense constructions possible in English that simply don't exist in other languages.
Surprised, if you know three romance languages, that you didn't know that. And while you're about it, you might contemplate just what tense 'you didn't know' might be in, and consider that I know of no language other than English which can express precisely that meaning (as distinct from 'you knew not', 'you have not known' and 'you were not knowing' (oo, there's those three conjugations again)...
What's coming in the next few decades, though, is extensive genetic modification. We have this now as a commercial technology for vegetables. In time it willl work for mammals.
But it won't work very well for a long time, because it takes several lifetimes to debug a new organism. That's why genecists work on fruit flies, with short lifetimes.
Cloning research gives us an example of the debug problems - there are over a hundred cloned animals in the world now. Some of them are healthy, but most of them aren't. And that's just cloning, with zero intentional modification. For cloning, this is just a process problem, and it will be fixed. But for new organisms, there will be design problems. Those will be much tougher to debug.
This will result in many defective organisms, with all the ethical issues that implies. Kill them off and start over? Or what?
At some point, backwards compatibility may be dumped. That happens when a new species (one that won't interbreed) is created. We'll probably have multiple new species, from different vendors. If you thought race and nationalism were a problems, wait until this comes along.
The key point to realize is that making new, improved life is likely to work well before retrofitting the old model does. That technology almost works now, just not very well.
Now, this isn't about us all-powerful humans "bestowing" rights upon other species, any more than the "Vote for Women" movement of the 1920s was about us all-wise males granting those silly girls the chance to play at politics. In reality, it was about us getting over our stupid and baseless preconception that men had some superior capacity to be decision-makers.
In this case, it's about us finally getting over ourselves as a species. We should start recognizing the potential of intelligence in other lifeforms [including artificial ones], and not denying rights to those who wish to improve on their bodies' natural abilities with technology.
That's like saying "why do anything about slavery until we can get rid of this anti-Irish sentiment?" Once our society started dealing with the integration of obviously non-white people, bitching people out for being from the wrong chunk of the British Isles wasn't important anymore.
In the same way, I figure that when we have to start dealing with questions about seriously post- or trans-human people, the questions of skin color will magically evaporate.
Your decision to value other species according to their genetic relationship to your own is utter hogwash, for several reasons. Well, actually only one reason, but there are many variations on the theme.
For example, an octopus is genetically further from us than a chipmunk, and also a great deal more intelligent. There is no reason to value the chipmunk more highly. A dolphin is more genetically dissimilar to us than a howler monkey, but it's clear that they function at a far higher cognitive level.
Next, let's look at people. Imagine two people born to the same parents. One of them is healthy, and functioning normally. The other, because of a drug-induced birth defect, was born with nothing above the brain stem. From a strictly genetic standpoint, these two are nearly identical, but clearly one is capable of full participation in society, and the other is not.
The thing is, genes are nothing but a recipe. In our case, it's a recipe for bipeds with dextrous hands and a brain capable of amazing learning and adaptability. If some other recipe--whether a totally dissimilar genetic code or a metal and plastic manufacturing process--is capable of creating a similar mind, then we cannot deny them rights because ours is the One True Recipe. It's just narrow-minded bigotry.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I myself have never bothered putting it in this way - it seems like your average person either gets it by using the word "transsexual", is curious enough to find out more so that you can describe things in better, more accurate terms, or is the type that freaks out no matter how you put it.
Of course, then again, I often don't bother to even mention it to other people anyways, unless it's quite relevant or I feel comfortable to the people it is being mentioned to.
I do wonder if I'd consider being transsexual related to being transhuman at all, other than not accepting the body you were born with as the final word in things. After all, it's just adjusting to a slightly different type of "human", instead of becoming more than human. Would be interesting to see how many TS folk would find the transhumanist points of view to click with them though. Did with me.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."