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As crazy as it may sound, one of the best articles I’ve seen in a long time about the ethics of emerging technologies comes from the pages of Cracked magazine.
From the war on drugs to gay marriage to file sharing, it seems like the law is in a continual, often losing, battle to keep up with the modern world.
But it’s only going to get worse from here. Advances in genetic engineering and AI are going to change what it means to be human, and that means lots and lots of work for the future’s lawyers.
Mike Treder is the Managing Director of the IEET, and former Executive Director of the non-profit Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.
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I think it's great that Cracked (of all things) is bringing attention to these very important issues, but I hope you're not intending to endorse their positions on them. I'm not going to go through all of them, but just starting with #6: The author of the article has clearly not read ANY of De Grey's work, in which he spends a lot of words debunking precisely the kind of mud that Cracked is slinging around.
The most egregious claim is "First, it will cost money to keep these people going (it already costs far, far more to care for the elderly than it does for young people)." This one is so pervasive that De Grey often starts his talks with a refutation of it (which nobody is apparently listening to): The object is to extend _healthy_ life, not decrepitude. In point of fact, it's much easier to keep a healthy person healthy than to keep a dying person alive.
The issue of social change being inhibited by anti-aging is a more subtle one, but it is one that De Grey has addressed in his writing _many_ times, and I see no effort by Cracked to attempt to refute any of his arguments.
There are similar problems several of the other five sections of the article.
So while I am glad to see these issues getting coverage, I worry that it sounds like you or the IEET is endorsing their positions, which seem to be mostly glib and ill-thought-out, as befits Cracked, a publication whose purpose is entertainment, and not education.
Corporations breeding children into corporate slavery? Wot!
Yet something wicked this way comes. This is why it is crucial that the ethical discussions regarding these advances are placed in the public arena with urgency. Human rights will soon be a thing of the past if governments have their way, and who and what is to stop them? : public opinion?
Laws will be passed without so much as a mention, why? Because we have all been caught short and caught lazy. (I fear we may already be too late for that spiritual and ethical evolution I was praying for).
Come on IEET it's time to get heavy with the ethics!
Seems there was a time no so long ago in a galaxy far, far away that had this army of clones : with no parents, and no kin to grieve for them when sent to war for the selfish aims of the empire.
@Glenn: No, we're certainly not endorsing any of the positions taken in the Cracked article. I'm not even sure, really, if the author is totally serious about them either; sometimes people put things out there just to get a reaction. In any case, I think the piece does a nice job of raising serious issues in a fairly informative way. We do need to be thinking about them even if our conclusions are quite different than his might be.
Or in other words, legalizing murder. I hope the Cracked editors don't really mean it, and I am certain Mike's mentioning it does not constitute endorsement. We must reduce oppression and limitations of people's autonomy, not increase them.
If the planet intellect is growing like the science is actually doing, i hope that we wont need any lawyers or police anymore in the future, maybe we could live with a parental AI superior to us in every sense, a sort of New Demiurg.
Sorry for the lateness of this comment -- I have only just found the link.
As the author of the article in question, I had to strike a balance. The original article idea was focused purely on ethics -- but, as editorial said, there could, and have, been whole books written about each subsection.
The idea was to get people thinking about where we are going with technology -- and preferably smiling occasionally too, as it is meant to be a humour site.
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