924
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- A History of the World since 1300 (68)
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- Russian History: from Lenin to Putin (2)
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Notes on video lecture:
What Do We Want to Want?
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on March 31, 2015 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
privacy, inorganic, CV, equality, insurance, unpredictable, forbidden, direction, money, consciousness, biological, materializes, stem, health, fair, 30, DNA, brain, deluding, stop, ethical, useless, prolong, short, Internet, enhancing, hundred, stronger, human, become, beings, Mars, exist, predict, 15, fast, diseases
•
today only a fraction of the potentiality of engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic life has been realized
•
yet we are already dealing with the social, political and issues of these changes
•
lawyers and judges need to rethink issues of and identity
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governments need to rethink issues of healthcare and
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educational institutions need to rethink what play and achievement means
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pension funds and welfare programs need to readjust to a world where 60 is the new
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privacy
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mapping the human genome took years and 3 billion dollars
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today you can map your DNA within a few days and at the cost of a few dollars
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this opens the way a revolution in medical care, to personalized medicine that matches treatment to your own
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your family doctor can tell you with greater certainty than ever before that
•
you may face high risks of liver cancer but don't need to worry much about heart attacks
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a common medicine that helps other people is to you and that you can take another medication that is dangerous to most people but will be very helpful to you
•
if companies are allowed to see your DNA scan, those with high risks based on DNA information would have to pay higher rates
•
employers may be more interested in your DNA scan than your
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you may not be hired because you have a gene that correlates with problematic behavior
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many governments assert today that all citizens should be given fair medical treatment
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all citizens have the right to remain in relatively good
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this is all well and good as long as medicine was concerned with preventing illness and healing the sick
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what will happen when medicine becomes more and more preoccupied with human abilities, giving humans new abilities instead of just healing sickness and illnesses?
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throughout history the upper classes always claimed that they are smarter, better, and than the lower classes
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but they were usually just themselves
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but today, with the help of new scientific medical advances
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those with may actually be able to become smarter and stronger than those with less money
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humans will increasingly become in an increasingly large percentage of their bodies
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singularity
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a point in which even the near future becomes to difficult to
•
term taken from singularity
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e.g. the Big Bang
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all known natural laws including space and time did not
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anything that happened before the Big Bang is also meaningless to us
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the notion of time had no meaning during the Big Bang so you can't speak meaningfully about the time before the Big Bang
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a point of singularity in the past
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we like to believe that in the future people like us will travel from planet to planet in space ships
•
we don't like to contemplate that with emotions and identities like ours will no longer exist and our place in the universe will be taken by our biologically modified descendents, who look at us the same way we look at Neanderthals
•
but history teaches again and again that what seems to be inevitable just around the corner often never
•
when the nuclear age began in the 1940s
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when the space age began with Sputnik and Apollo
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people began to forecast that people would live on or have unlimited nuclear energy
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nobody in the time at Hiroshima and Sputnik managed to forecast the
•
therefore one should not take predictions as reliable information
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what is important is not the exact predictions but the idea that the future will not only include organizational and technical transformations
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but much evidence point toward the possibility of fundamental revolutions in human consciousness and human identity
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will call into question what means
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when a singularity-type conditions begins to occur when technology becomes
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less radical forcasts speak in terms of centuries into the future
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but from the perspective of the 70,000 years of human history since the last cognitive revolution, a few centuries is a very time
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what is becoming clear is that homo sapiens should start thinking about these matters
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the most important question today for human beings in terms of the far-reaching future is, "what do you want to ?"
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in what way do we want to enhance humankind?
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it is unlikely that our biologically modified and evolved descendants who think on another level of will have much interest in the religions or ideologies or countries that we find so important today
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they may not even have genders like we do
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the field of bioethics usually ask not "what do we want to become" but "what is forbidden to do"
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is it ethical to genetic experiments on living human beings
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is it ethical to genetic experiments on aborted fetuses
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is it ethical to genetic experiments on cells
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is it ethical to clone sheep
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is it ethical to clone chimpanzees
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is it ethical to clone humans
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all of these questions are important
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but it is naive to believe that we will be able to scientific projects in the coming centuries which will have as their goal to upgrade the abilities of homo sapiens into a different kind of being
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these projects will be inextricably meshed together with the human quest to overcome disease and human life which even today almost enjoy complete global acceptance
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ask scientists who are studying the human genome or are trying to connect a to a computer why they are doing this
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the standard answer is that they are doing this in order to cure and prolong human life
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yet the implications of breaking the code of the human DNA or creating a mind inside a computer are far more dramatic than curing this or that disease
•
this argumentation serves to justify almost everything science does
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whenever there is ethical doubt, we just remember that we are working to cure disease and prolong human life, and we say, ok, go on
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the only thing we can try to do is somehow influence the this progress is taking
•
therefore we need to stop only asking what is ethically to do, and start asking a far more important and difficult question: what do we want to become?
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and since we may soon be able to engineer even our desires, the real question facing human kind today is "what do we want to want?"
Spelling Corrections:
forcasts ⇒ forecasts
Ideas and Concepts:
21st century vocabulary via this morning's History of Humankind class: "genetic discrimination, n. unfair treatment which occurs when people are treated differently, for example by their employer or insurance company, because they have or are perceived to have a gene mutation that causes or increases the risk of an inherited disorder"
From the human pride department via tonight's History of Humanity class: "We like to believe that in 1000 years people like us will travel from planet to planet in fast space ships. We don't like to contemplate that beings with emotions and identities like ours will no longer exist and our place in the universe will be taken by our biologically modified descendents, who look at us the same way we look at Neanderthals."
On asking the right questions about the future, via this afternoon's History of Humankind class: "It is naive to believe that we will be able to stop scientific projects in the coming centuries which have as their goal to upgrade the abilities of homo sapiens into a different kind of being, as these projects are inextricably meshed together with the human quest to overcome disease and prolong human life, which even today enjoy almost complete global acceptance. Ask any scientist or science-funding organization today involved in the studying of the human genome or trying to connect a brain to a computer why they are doing this, and the answer will usually be that they are doing this for some medical purpose, e.g. in order to cure diseases or prolong human life. Yet the implications of breaking the code of the human DNA or creating a mind inside a computer are far more dramatic than curing this or that disease, and this argumentation can serve to justify almost any scientific project. Realistically, the most effective thing we can try to do is somehow influence the direction this progress is taking. Therefore we need to stop only asking what is ethically forbidden to do, and start asking a far more important and difficult question, i.e. What do we want to become? And since we may soon be able to engineer even our desires, the real question facing humankind today is:What do we want to want?"
From the intellectual integrity department via this afternoon's History of Humankind course: "We have come to the end of this course, but before we say good-bye, I would like to stress once more that what we learned during this course is not the truth. It is just one possible story about the history of humankind. If you asked 10 different historians to give this course, you would most probably get 10 very different stories. So you shouldn't accept everything you've heard in this course as the truth. It is better to take it as an informed invitation to explore history by yourself. My aim in teaching this course was not so much to convince you that this or that particular theory is true, but rather to raise important questions in your mind about the past, present, and future of humankind. So I hope you leave this course with more questions than when you came, and with a desire to study and learn more about the history of human beings. In addition, I hope you leave this course feeling a bit more uneasy than when you started, uneasy about the many questions for which we humans have no clear answer, uneasy about the many problematic events that have happened in our past, and uneasy about the direction history may be taking us in the future."
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