Links Of Required Clicking

In Rob Reiner’s classic The Princess Bride, we learned about ROUSs (Rodents Of Unusual Size). Now we present a new feature from the IEET: LORCs (Links Of Required Clicking).

First, to refresh your memory:

And now, on to today’s LORCs.

We begin with a follow-up to our much-discussed recent commentaries on veganism. This link is to a blog article about an obviously controversial proposal to genetically engineered pain-free animals as a way to make factory farming and human carnivorism more ethically palatable.

“If we can’t do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused,” says Adam Shriver, a philosopher at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. In a provocative paper published this month, Shriver contends that genetically engineered pain-free animals are the most acceptable alternative. “I’m offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering.”

Performing brain surgery on livestock wouldn’t be feasible on an industrial scale. Livestock would have to be genetically engineered to be pain-free for it to be profitable.

Okay then. You want an example of an ethical issue related to emerging technologies? It can’t get much more obvious than this.

Should we use our improving facility in genetic engineering to make the animals we kill and eat not suffer pain? Somehow I doubt this idea will find much approval here, but I could be wrong.

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Moving on.

This link is related to articles we’ve published here about global warming and options for carbon-neutral renewable energy solutions. It shows a mind-boggling map of the Earth that illustrates how little land area is required to “power the world with zero carbon emissions.” Really stunning. The lesson here is that 100% sustainable energy is not something beyond our reach technologically—it’s merely a matter of political will power.

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Next, please!

Our third required click is to an article on PhysOrg titled “Researchers Hope to Mass-Produce Tiny Robots.” This link informs us that:

Tiny robots the size of a flea could one day be mass-produced, churned out in swarms and programmed for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning, and more. In an effort to reach this goal, a recent study has demonstrated the initial tests for fabricating microrobots on a large scale. . .

The robots are powered by a solar cell on top, and move by three vibrating legs. A fourth vibrating leg is used as a touch sensor. As the researchers explain, a single microrobot by itself is a physically simple individual. But many robots communicating with each other using infrared sensors and interacting with their environment can form a group that is capable of establishing swarm intelligence to generate more complex behavior. . .

“I look upon them more like a manufacturing way for future robots,” Erik Edqvist of Uppsala University in Sweden told PhysOrg.com. “There are cool experiments going on with flying insects, swimming robots and so on. But it is time for the miniaturized robots to leave the research laboratories and find useful applications. That is where this work fits in. It is an attempt (with a somewhat small budget) to try to build robots in a mass-fabricated way.”

Although this development would make use of existing rather than emerging technologies, it does indicate a trend that leads toward disruptive change and therefore is of interest to us.

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Last, but far from least, this link confirms what many of us have believed for a long time: that, genetically speaking, there is no such thing as ‘ethnic groups’; ethnicity is a constructed social system maintaining genetic boundaries with other groups, rather than being the outcome of common genetic ancestry.

We’re all the same under the skin. Language, culture, and tradition may separate us, but genetics do not. We are one human family, and it is well for us to remember this as we embark upon an age of powerful new emerging technologies and potentially divisive ethical challenges.