Accelerating Future

I’ve been reading some of the public material on the new President’s Council on Bioethics, because I can’t for the life of me figure out what they do. I do know that they’re called the “Presidential Council for the Study of Bioethical Issues” now. Same domain name, different panel. It seems as if Obama was so against the old commission that he had to destroy it and create a new one from scratch, which highlights the transitory and low-power nature of the body.

Checking out the background materials section of their website, I was compelled to click on the first presentation at meeting two, “Oversight of Emerging Technologies”. It outlines important overall characteristics of this panel. Their mission is as follows:

1. To monitor scientific/medical developments (“advances”) and identify the issues they will raise for society
2. To bridge divide between science and society
3. To articulate the range of views on controversial subjects, To inform the political process & policymaking
4. To provide guidance to individuals & healthcare professionals
5. To provide recommendations to policymakers

Another important part, under “mode of work”, is this:

Not asked to invent new philosophical theories but to offer conclusions & recommendations based on multidisciplinary analysis of issues facing policy makers, healthcare professionals, scientists, patients & families

I love this part. It seems to be a nod to the theological conservative philosophy underlying Bush’s panel, and backing away from that attitude. Some of the panel members are no doubt aware of transhumanism as well, so the statement might be seen as a reassurance that the panel won’t take sides and align with any particular philosophy.

The problem with not inventing or using existing philosophical theories is that you disempower yourself. Philosophical theories often dictate the course of history. The Presidential panel’s decision not to embrace philosophies for guiding bioethical decisions (as if that’s even possible) creates a power vacuum for transhumanists and bioconservatives to fight over.

Because the panels are so transitory and ephemeral anyway, they lack stability and power. Transhumanism, in contrast, is an ongoing, capable, increasingly higher-profile community that was more or less founded with the launch of the extropians mailing list in 1991. Bioconservatives, meanwhile, mostly focus on near-term issues like abortion, outlawing marijuana, and assorted anti-gay bigotry. With regard to future issues, the issues that will determine the trajectory of the 21st century, they are mostly highly disorganized or silent. The New Atlantis, the bioconservative journal, has received barely any external coverage in its seven years of existence. Surprisingly, sometimes the editor’s column in the Wall Street Journal more closely resembles transhumanist articles than anything written by Leon Kass.

As far as I can tell, the main function of Obama’s panel seems to be to assess the potential risks of synthetic biology, which is fantastic. The phrase “life extension” does not appear anywhere on the site.

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From New World Notes, James Au’s standard blog on SL, comes news that Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Lab (the company behind SecondLife), is “working towards creating a sentient artificial intelligence which [exists] in a virtual world.” Um, OK. Here is a quote:

That Philip plans to revolutionize AI technology — in effect, achieving singularity in a virtual world — isn’t that surprising, because he said as much when I talked with him for The Making of Second Life:

Hey! Slow down. A Singularity in a virtual world could easily transcend its boundaries and cause problems for us all. I don’t think that Rosedale will achieve human-level AGI anytime soon, but we must acknowledge that the boundary between the virtual and the “real” is pretty damn thin. Perhaps this is just James Au’s choice of words, but I wish all of his readers would understand that AGI is not just a game, or a new entertainment company. It could utterly transform the planet in a way that it’s never been transformed in its entire 4.56 billion year history.

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Glenn Reynolds has an article on the Singularity at Popular Mechanics.

Ron Bailey has the “deets” on the recent Manhattan Beach Longevity Summit.

Hank Hyena, a seemingly new-ish writer at h+ magazine, has a cool article on in-vitro meat, titled “Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives”. One of them is “exotic cuisine”:

In-Vitro Meat will be fashioned from any creature, not just domestics that were affordable to farm. Yes, ANY ANIMAL, even rare beasts like snow leopard, or Komodo Dragon. We will want to taste them all. Some researchers believe we will also be able to create IVM using the DNA of extinct beasts — obviously, “DinoBurgers” will be served at every six-year-old boy’s birthday party.

Give me that endangered snow leopard burger!

And to transhumanists who still eat meat from highly intelligent animals like pigs, I ask — why do you consume and cage animals who are obviously aware of their pain and suffering and yet still expect superintelligences or superhumans to treat you with respect? The human/not-human simplistic dichotomy of morality is not going to work as a moral structure in the long term. We’re going to need more precise technical definitions of what we value, even if those definitions disagree.

There is a line above which all animals should be profoundly respected, in my opinion, and I’m not sure where that line lies, but it’s probably pretty low. I am a mostly-vegetarian myself (eat fish and dairy occasionally), and to any vegans out there, I would be interested in hearing your opinions on shrimp and oyster. Does anyone know how many neurons are in a shrimp brain?

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Funny. Apparently Obama considers the current Presidential Council on Bioethics to be nothing more than a philosophical talk shop that avoids creating consensus. But… I thought they did have a (lame) consensus? Perhaps this is all nicey-nice talk for, “the group sucks, let’s make a new one.”

President Obama will appoint a new bioethics commission, one with a new mandate and that “offers practical policy options,” Mr. Cherlin said.

Probably this means one not poisoned by Judeo-Christian fundamentalism and Kassite stupidity. Though Obama is a Christian, he’s a Christian in that more modern sense of the word, as in, he pretty much ignores parts of the Bible he doesn’t like. He’s publicly denounced Leviticus, which is a good start. Here’s what Jesus said:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Mark 5:18)

How about we like, say screw all the parts of the law that have to do with stoning women who aren’t virgins on their wedding night? Christians always like to use Jesus as an excuse to basically say that everything in the Old Testament is invalid, but Jesus himself said that he approves of the Old Testament. He also believed that Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale. He also said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24), and here’s how his group worked:

And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. (Acts 2:44)

So Jesus was an advocate of being poor and communist.

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Modern policy analysts are so overexposed to approximate human-to-human parity and balance of power geopolitics that they forget there have been many times throughout history when military and political leaders have tried to take over the world. Alexander the Great tried it. So did Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, and several others. The problem with global hegemony is that, once established, it might not be possible to uproot, especially if leaders take advantage of life extension technology. A must-read analysis of the risk of global totalitarianism is presented by Bryan Caplan in the Global Catastrophic Risks volume. Caplan argues that we should avoid forming global government or increasingly wider international coalitions because of the risk that these will turn sour and enable global totalitarianism. He goes into reasons why global totalitarianism may be a stable state, one of them being that there would be no free countries as examples of alternative political systems.

Arguments for why radical human intelligence enhancement is nothing to be afraid of fall into two categories: that progress will be so incremental that mutual accountability is preserved, and that humans are already so close to being as smart as it’s possible to be that no abrupt and destabilizing forward jumps are likely to occur. Advocates for the former argument are too numerous to list, the most prominent being Ray Kurzweil, but the group of adherents includes practically all transhumanists. Advocates for the latter are rarer but still common — I recall J. Storrs Hall (author of Nanofuture and a speaker at the 2007 Singularity Summit) advocating this perspective on the CRN Global Task Force internal mailing list in 2006. Because rebutting the second argument is easy, I shall give myself a challenge and focus on the first.

Significant intelligence enhancement, like turning someone with an 140 IQ into a 220 IQ supergenius within a timespan of a few weeks or months, is regarded in mainstream neurotech research as extremely far off, if it is regarded at all. That means that if such a radical approach is pursued by anyone, it’s more likely to be pursued by a single team than several teams. If the team fails, nothing happens, but if they succeed, they stand alone. This creates a bothersome situation for any potential competitors. Because the winners bet on such long odds, the payoff is huge. Like a destitute man who bets the last of his life savings on a long-shot pick at the racetrack, only to win big, the neurotech researchers crazy enough to shoot for serious enhancement might take home all the chips.

Another plausible reason to expect abrupt breakthoughs (if any at all) rather than incremental safety is that evolution has likely already found all the easy upgrades to human intelligence. Intelligence has been the primary locus and driver of human evolution ever since we split from our hominid ancestors, and likely before that. H. habilis, the first member of the genus Homo, had a brain capacity of between 590 and 650 cm³ , while H. sapiens has a brain capacity in the range of 1350 to 1450 cm³. This is a more than doubling of brain capacity in two million years, which is a very rare event. Because brains are so energy-hungry, evolution is usually conservative with them, focusing on other things instead. That is why sauropods and other large dinosaurs had such minute brains for their size. Reptiles are not the only successful animals in the fossil record with pathetic brains — Daeodon, a vile pig-like giant (entelodont) from the Miocene, was 3 m (10 ft) long and 2.1 m (7 ft) at the shoulder, yet it only had a brain capacity of about 100 cm³.

When the genus Homo had the good fortune to stumble upon the cognitive niche, we exploited it good. Its value relative to other possible adaptations is obvious — if it weren’t so useful, then Nature wouldn’t have bothered ballooning our brain size so quickly. It is clearly possible for evolutionary superstars to get by without it. This extensive two million year exploitation of the cognitive niche shows us that evolution has undergone extensive optimization to bring us to this point. If we’re going to improve our intelligence, we’re going to have to try something radical, like developing a brain implant that fuses seamlessly with the neural circuitry that generates and stores mental imagery. This will not be easy. Even if you have a complete wiring diagram of the human brain, it still looks just like a pile of millions of tangled ethernet cords. Simply having a little drink of nootropics will not be enough.

If a major intervention is needed to get anywhere, then a major intervention is likely to be the first viable intelligence enhancement technology developed. From a naive, early 90s transhumanist perspective, this is great — big intelligence enhancement for everybody! From a more cynical perspective, that looks at how quickly and easily people get corrupted by power, and how intelligence is power, we get a frowny face. Combine that with historical knowledge that shows how readily people try to take over the world if given the chance, the fact that human nature is constant over historical time, and the possibly stable-state nature of global totalitarianism, and we have ourselves a problem. If the first intelligence-enhanced human is smart enough to rise to power in a country with a large military and nuclear arsenal, then expansionism can begin under the guise of whatever rallying call of the week is expedient. Keep in mind that John McCain gained 46 percent of the nationwide popular vote in the recent elections, and his election would have put a laughing-stock no-brainer like Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from control of enough nuclear weapons to wipe out half the world’s population. If Sarah Palin could have become President by accident, then an unscupulous and charismatic intelligence augmentee capable of concealing its origin could acquire similar power in no time at all. Then things would get really interesting.

Humans are easily fooled. Studies show that we place ridiculous confidence in the value of face-to-face interviews for job hiring when the data shows that prior performance is far more predictive of future performance. Someone that can control their facial signals with a degree of deliberativeness and planning slightly superior to any natural human being would have a huge unfair advantage, leapfrogging the evolutionary arms race of deceivers and deceit-detectors. We have a totally overblown confidence in our own ability to detect deceit in other minds because our brains have been shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to be able to detect deceit in other humans. These other humans were built by genomes in lockstep with our own as far as the evolutionary arms race goes. Take away the shared humanness, and your beloved deceit compass is useless. A person with a seemingly superficial set of cognitive upgrades for calculating and planning out their own facial expressions and vocal tone might be able to fool people 1000 times out of 1000, like a used car salesman from Hell. Combine that with genuinely superior intelligence and you have an entity that can run circles around us.

I don’t mean to be an alarmist. The first enhanced human intelligence might be a great guy or gal, someone who genuinely wants to lift everyone else up and lead us into a happy Kurzweilian future, or even better. It could also be someone who never thought of themselves as elitist until they started regularly thinking thoughts that not even the smartest humans are capable of, then suddenly other people begin to look like dirt. There are many people out there, bioethicists included, who mock the idea of giving rights to animals or foregoing the slightest culinary whim for the well-being of a non-human animal. Wesley J. Smith, a widely recognized bioethicist with the Discovery Institute and a former collaborator with Ralph Nader, calls human exceptionalism the “bedrock of human rights”. A small clique of transhumans might have a different idea — they might call transhuman exceptionalism the bedrock of their own elitist “rights”. Accordingly, human beings would become nothing but tools to be used in their rise to power.

The moral of the story is that we should be very careful about how we advocate intelligence enhancement technologies, and how these are applied when developed, especially in the immediate days or weeks after the fabrication of the first effective prototypes.

For one interesting short story on the possible effects of genuine human intelligence enhancement, see Ted Chiang’s short story Understand.

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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.

I’ve been sniping at Leon Kass since I joined the online life extension community in 2001. “Objections to Immortality: Answering Leon Kass” was one of my first life extension advocacy works. In 2004, my paper was discussed by Tihamer Toth-Fejel at the 1st Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology in Washington, DC, in his presentation, A Critical Look at Leon Kass and Transhumanists on Ageless Bodies.

That’s why it’s exciting to have prestigious cognitive scientist Dr. Steven Pinker, author of what is possibly the best book on evolutionary psychology ever written, How the Mind Works, come join the fray. In The Stupidity of Dignity, published a couple weeks ago at The New Republic, Dr. Pinker sees right through Kass’ hyper-theological, far-right, intolerant, paternalistic bioethics.

Pinker presents several good reasons for why the concept of “dignity”, an all-purpose freedom-restricting platitude used by theocons in America’s capital at and at the Vatican alike, is not very useful in bioethics. He pokes fun at the recent, laugh-out-loud 555-page volume, Human Dignity and Bioethics, writing, “Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.” Fortunately for America and the world, mainstream bioethicists will have none of it.

According to Pinker, many of the Dignity contributors are hot under the collar about the bioethicist Ruth Macklin, writer of a recent editorial in British Medical Journal, Dignity is a Useless Concept, making her “the villain of almost every piece”. But it doesn’t take a professor of bioethics to see why the “dignity” of Kass and the Vatican is a concept that can be molded into pretty much whatever the writer wants it to be. A bright High School student could do it as a weekend project.

In his piece, Pinker exposes us to the ludicrousness of the report, sparing us from slogging through its 555 mind-numbing pages. Pinker writes, “the volume finds room for seven essays that align their arguments with Judeo-Christian doctrine. We read passages that assume the divine authorship of the Bible, that accept the literal truth of the miracles narrated in Genesis (such as the notion that the biblical patriarchs lived up to 900 years), that claim that divine revelation is a source of truth, that argue for the existence of an immaterial soul separate from the physiology of the brain, and that assert that the Old Testament is the only grounds for morality.” Pinker also included my favorite Kass quote — the one about how eating ice cream in public makes us no different than animals. You can’t make this stuff up.

Having naysayers like Kass makes being an advocate of life extension both fun and easy. However, just because Kass and company are off the deep end does not mean that there aren’t valid concerns about the ethics of life extension. That’s why Aubrey de Grey is organizing the evening session “Aging: the Disease, the Cure, the Implications” next month in Los Angeles. Why transhumanists and other forward-looking thinkers have discussions in journals and on blogs, such as this one, about the ethics of this whole project. Although radical life extension will not radically increase the population over what it would otherwise be (population expands exponentially either way), our lifestyles with the current manufacturing base are indeed unsustainable, which is why we must invest in clean manufacturing processes, like nanomanufacturing, and low-waste or no-waste power sources, like solar thermal, thorium reactors, and nuclear fusion.

When George W. Bush is ejected from the White House and replaced with Barack Obama, Kass’ time in the sun will be over. He will continue to age, all the while denying medical treatments that could extend his life, until he presumably dies. However, I would welcome a discussion with Leon Kass in the year 2050 or beyond. Dr. Kass, if you ever come around and take advantage of rejuvenation therapies, in which billions of dollars are already being invested, don’t be afraid to drop us life extensionists a line. We’ll be waiting, having fun and enjoying life.

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From Reuters:

“VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of “new” sins such as causing environmental blight.

The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican’s number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.

Asked what he believed were today’s “new sins,” he told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.

“(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control,” he said.

The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning.”

Why? :(

See some benefits of gene therapy so far.

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(Cross-posted from Lifeboat Foundation blog.)

I’ve been taking a look at an “international civil society organization” called the ETC Group. The “ETC” group is also known as the “Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration”. To be honest, I can’t figure them out. Here is a summary:

“ETC Group is an international civil society organization based in Canada. We are dedicated to the conservation and sustainable advancement of cultural and ecological diversity and human rights. ETC Group supports socially responsible development of technologies useful to the poor and marginalized and we address international governance issues affecting the international community. We also monitor the ownership and control of technologies and the consolidation of corporate power.”

So they look like a somewhat standard leftist environmentalist technology oversight group. Alright.

Here is their stance on nanotechnology:

“Nanotechnology refers to the manipulation of matter on the scale of the nanometer (one billionth of a meter). Nanoscale science operates in the realm of single atoms and molecules. At present, commercial nanotechnology involves materials science (i.e. researchers have been able to make materials that are stronger and more durable by taking advantage of property changes that occur when substances are reduced to nanoscale dimensions). In the future, as nanoscale molecular self-assembly becomes a commercial reality, nanotech will move into conventional manufacturing. While nanotechnology offers opportunities for society, it also involves profound social and environmental risks, not only because it is an enabling technology to the biotech industry, but also because it involves atomic manipulation and will make possible the fusing of the biological world and the mechanical. There is a critical need to evaluate the social implications of all nanotechnologies; in the meantime, the ETC group believes that a moratorium should be placed on research involving molecular self-assembly and self-replication.”

(Bold by me.)

This is a touchy issue for researchers. At the Lifeboat Foundation we sometimes talk about the Religion of Science, which states that science must progress as quickly as possible and that any attempt to limit it is foolish and immoral. We’ve had people leave our Scientific Advisory Board when they realized that we did not subscribe to this Religion, but in fact question whether any scientist should be allowed to do just anything.

But we do not go as far as the ETC Group, which is proposing a blanket ban on all molecular self-assembly, a very large and potentially incredibly fruitful field.

What prompted me to write on the ETC Group was a news release they sent me today on synthetic biology:

ETC Group
News Release
17 October 2007
www.etcgroup.org

Syns of Omission:
Civil Society Organizations Respond to Report on Synthetic Biology
Governance from the J. Craig Venter Institute and Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation

A report released today on policy options for governance of synthetic
biology is a disappointing effort that fails to address wider
societal concerns about the rapid deployment of a powerful and
controversial new technology. Synthetic biology aims to commercialize
new biological parts, devices and living organisms that are
constructed from synthetic DNA – including dangerous pathogens.
Synthetic biologists are attempting to harness cells as tiny
factories for industrial production of chemicals, including
pharmaceuticals and fuels. ETC Group describes the synthetic biology
approach as “extreme genetic engineering.”

The report, authored by scientists and employees from the J. Craig
Venter Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the
Center for Strategic & International Studies (Washington, D.C.) was
funded by a half-million dollar grant from the U.S.-based Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation and billed as a “project to examine the societal
implications of synthetic genomics.” The study was more than two
years in the making, but the report makes no policy recommendations
and failed to properly consult civil society. While the authors do
acknowledge possible bio-error (i.e., synbio accidents that cause
unintended harm to human health and the environment), the emphasis is
on how to impede bioterrorists “in a post-September 11 world.”

“This report is a partial consideration of governance by a partisan
group of authors,” explains Jim Thomas of ETC Group. “Its authors are
‘Synthusiasts’ – or, unabashed synthetic biology boosters – who are
primarily concerned about holding down costs and regulatory burdens
that could allegedly stymie the rapid development of the new
industry. By focusing narrowly on safety and security in a U.S.-
centric context, the report conveniently overlooks important
questions related to power, control and the economic impacts of
synthetic biology. The authors have ignored the first and most basic
questions: Is synthetic biology socially acceptable or desirable? Who
should decide? Who will control the technology, and what are its
potential impacts?”

The report’s authors include representatives from institutions that
have a vested interest in commercialization of synthetic biology.
According to the J. Craig Venter Institute, one of the three
institutions that led the study, scientists are just weeks or months
away from announcing the creation of the world’s first-ever living
bacterium with entirely synthetic DNA and a novel genome. Scientists
from the Venter Institute have already applied for patents on the
artificial microbe, and Craig Venter predicts that it could be the
first billion or trillion dollar organism. The report fails to
address issues of ownership, monopoly practices or intellectual
property claims arising from synthetic biology.

“The sixty-page report has oodles of input from a small circle of
scientists and policy ‘experts,’ but the 20-month long study fails to
incorporate views of civil society and social movements,” points out
Hope Shand, ETC Group’s Research Director. “An insular process like
the one that produced the Sloan report instills little confidence in
the results.”

The economic and technical barriers to synthetic genomics are
collapsing. Using a laptop computer, published gene sequence
information and mail-order synthetic DNA, it is becoming routine to
construct genes or entire genomes from scratch – including those of
lethal pathogens. The tools for DNA synthesis technologies are
advancing at break-neck pace – they’re becoming cheaper, faster and
widely accessible. The authors acknowledge this reality, and evaluate
several options for addressing it.

One proposal aimed at “legitimate users” of the technology – those
working in industry labs, for example – is to broaden the
responsibilities of Institutional Biosafety Committees, which were
established (in the US) to assess the biosafety and environmental
risks of proposed recombinant DNA experiments.

Edward Hammond, Director of the Sunshine Project, a biotech and
bioweapons watchdog, argues, “Institutional Biosafety Committees are
a documented disaster. IBCs aren’t up to their existing task of
overseeing genetic engineering research, much less ready to absorb
new synthetic biology and security mandates. The authors of this
report are aware of the abject failure of voluntary compliance by
IBCs, including by the Venter Institute’s own IBC. So it is very
difficult to interpret their suggestion that IBCs oversee synthetic
biology as anything but a cynical attempt to avoid effective
governance.”

Options for governing synthetic biology must not be set by the
synthetic biologists themselves – broad societal debate on synbio’s
wider implications must come first. Synthetic microbes should be
treated as dangerous until proven harmless and strong democratic
oversight should be mandatory – not optional. Earlier this year the
ETC Group recommended a ban on environmental release of de novo
synthetic organisms until wide societal debate and strong governance
are in place.

ETC and other civil society organizations have called repeatedly for
an inclusive, wide ranging public dialogue process on societal
implications and oversight options for Synthetic Biology.

The full text of “Synthetic Genomics: Options for Governance” is
available here:
http://www.jcvi.org/

ETC Group’s January 2007 report on synthetic biology, Extreme Genetic
Engineering, is available here:
http://www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?pub_id=602

Backgrounder: Open Letter on Synthetic Biology from Civil Society,
May 2006:
http://www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?pub_id=11

~~~

Does synthetic biology need more oversight? I believe it does. But I am hesitant to support the ETC Group in full, because some statements on their website have a Luddite flavor. For instance, I think it is infeasible to call for a moratorium on molecular self-assembly.

Another cause the ETC Group seems to be involved in is that of “Terminator” seeds — seeds that grow into plants which are sterile, forcing farmers to return to the seed market. They call this “an immoral application of biotechnology” and I’m inclined to agree.

The ETC Group also seems to employ the phrase “Playing God” to scare up support a little too often for my liking. And putting “extreme” before “genetic engineering”. It’s like so extreeeme, man, you should be extreeemely scared, obviously. (Synthetic biology really is extreme genetic engineering, but why the use of that term?)

I like paying attention to the risks of future technologies, without using tactics I consider pandering. A recent study on nanotechnology opinions figured out that the interviewer could easily manipulate the respondent’s opinions on the safety of nanotechnology simply with a few purposefully chosen sentences. People are irrational and they freak out about technological changes sometimes. By the same token, sometimes people are greedy or so blindly ambitious that they’ll discourage any regulation whatsoever in the name of capitalism and the free market. Both sides are wrong!

New technologies such as MNT and synthetic biology need to be regulated, but I don’t like the extremes I’m seeing: either pure boosterism, or borderline Luddism. The only organizations we can trust are those not attached to any particular extreme. The Lifeboat Foundation seems to be one.

What do you think?

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I strongly support the idea that regulations and ethics agreements should be adopted as universally as possible in biotechnology, because the danger is very great. However, it bugs me when religious bioethicists use a secular tone to win other scientists over to their point of view. That’s what Dr. Nancy Jones has been doing lately, with a press release that appeared on Eurekalert:

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — The time is ripe for scientific organizations to adopt codes of ethics, according to a scientist and bioethicist from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in the current issue of Science and Engineering Ethics.

“Medical practice and human subject research is influenced by the Hippocratic tradition,” said Nancy L. Jones, Ph.D., “but no similar code of ethics has been formalized for the life and biomedical sciences. Like the Hippocratic oath, a code of ethics for the life sciences can provide a continual standard to shape the ethical practice of science.”

But Jones points to a more far reaching impact of scientific activities. “Scientific prowess claims to not only predict our future, cure, or destroy people, and control evolution, but more portentously reframe what it means to be human.”

Scientific prowess not only claims – it delivers. Religious bioethicists like the idea of using science to heal surface problems, but want the general cycle of life to remain as it is, eschewing human enhancement. Transhumanists like myself cautiously support enhancement. But unlike most transhumanists, I see a profound danger in all transhumanist technologies, and think that transhumanists should more often consider selective relinquishment, or at the very least, selective development which boosts safe applications while supressing unsafe applications.

Nancy Jones is part of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, the bioconservative answer to the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. In an article on the CBHD site, “Genetics, Biotechnology, and the Future”, Jones writes,

The genetics and genomics revolution has at its core information and techniques that can be used to change humanness itself as well as the concepts of what it means to be human. The age-old human fantasies of the mythical chimeras of the ancients, supernatural intelligence, wiping disease from human inheritance, designing a better human being, the fountain of youth, and even immortality now have biotechnical credence in the theoretical promises of genetics and genetic engineering. Not only can humanity’s collective genetic inheritance be shaped by selecting which embryos are allowed to develop via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, but genetic engineering, the availability of the human embryo for experimentation, and combining genes from many species require only sufficient imagination to catalyze the designing of a new humanity.

Religious bioethicists are keenly aware of advances in biotechnology, because of the “yuck” factor, but few of them recognize that it is cybernetics that will impact us most profoundly in the coming decades, not biotechnology. For more on this, see John Smart’s insightful “Performance Limitations on Engineered Biological Systems” and Al Fin’s “Limitations to Biology”. For the most part, the future is nano, not bio. (Actually it’s cogno, but it’s better for more people to be thinking nano than bio, when considering 7+ year timeframes.)

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