Slashdot Mirror
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!
Emphasis added.
What's the basis for this claim? Cyborgs are genetic humans modified by technology.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
You think english verb conjugations are difficult? You don't speak any latin language, do you?
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.
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.