CONTENTS

1. A Note From Dr. J.
2. IEET News
3. Articles
4. Multimedia
5. TechEthx News
- IEET-News List Posts
- Trans-Spirit List Posts
6. Events
- with IEET Speakers
- all events

I’ve been fascinated with the growth in public awareness recently regarding bionic athletes. It’s very interesting to watch something go from fringe and then mainstream. Almost a year ago, an article by Jamais Casico made me take a real look at what it is to be bionic when he talked about his cochlear implant The Accidental Cyborg. Since then, I’ve had a heightened awareness and intrigue for the topic. 

People often ask me for my definition of the technological Singularity.  More specifically, they want me to offer some predictions as to what it will actually look like and what it might mean to them and the human species.

Leon Kass, the scientific community frowns on your deathist shenanigans and paternalistic tomfoolery.  We will continue to denounce your anti-freedom, control-freak bioethical views until the day your theocon allies are booted out of the White House, which will occur on January 20, 2009.  Enjoy your eight months.

Harvard’s Michael Sandel argues in his book The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering that life is a gift and that we should accept the unbidden nature of this gift, working toward acceptance and solidarity with others rather than seeking unbridled mastery over human biology.  But is life properly viewed as a gift?

The Fermi Paradox—if there’s other intelligent life in the galaxy, given how long the galaxy’s been here, how come we haven’t seen any indication of it?—is an important puzzle for those of us who like to think ahead. Setting aside the mystical (we’re all that was created by a higher being) and fundamentally unprovable (we’re all living in a simulation), we’re left with two unpalatable options: we’re the first intelligent species to arise; or no civilization ever makes it long enough. 

There’s two kinds of people asking me about the economy lately: people with money wanting to know how to keep it “safe,” and people without money, wanting to know how to keep safe, themselves. Maybe it’s the difference between those two concerns that best explains the underlying nature of today’s fiscal crisis. 

Discussions of the implications of the augmentation of our biological bodies with prosthetic technologies can be found quite readily in the esoteric discourses of self-described transhumanists, social theorists and bioethicists.

There’s been considerable media attention surrounding a recent breakthrough in the development of a male birth-control pill (MBCP).