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Category: ethics – Page 26

This lecture was recorded on March 25, 2012 as part of the Distinguished Science Lecture Series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society in California (1992–2015).

SAM HARRIS IS THE AUTHOR of the New York Times bestsellers, The Moral Landscape, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. His new book is short (96) pages, to the point, and will change the way we all view free will, as Oliver Sacks wrote: “Brilliant and witty — and never less than incisive — Free Will shows that Sam Harris can say more in 13,000 words than most people do in 100,000.” UCSD neuroscientist V.S, Ramachandran notes: “In this elegant and provocative book, Sam Harris demonstrates — with great intellectual ferocity and panache — that free will is an inherently flawed and incoherent concept, even in subjective terms. If he is right, the book will radically change the way we view ourselves as human beings.”

Sam Harris on “Free Will”

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Matthew Cobb is a zoologist and author whose background is in insect genetics and the history of science. Over the past decade or so, as CRISPR was discovered and applied to genetic remodeling, he started to get concerned—afraid, actually—about three potential applications of the technology. He’s in good company: Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for discovering and harnessing CRISPR, is afraid of the same things. So he decided to delve into these topics, and As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age is the result.

Summing up fears

The first of his worries is the notion of introducing heritable mutations into the human genome. He Jianqui did this to three human female embryos in China in 2018, so the three girls with the engineered mutations that they will pass on to their kids (if they’re allowed to have any) are about four now. Their identities are classified for their protection, but presumably their health is being monitored, and the poor girls have probably already been poked and prodded incessantly by every type of medical specialist there is.

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The escalating crisis exposes the weakness of Biden’s position. He is gambling with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, over which he has no moral claim, that Ukraine will somehow be in a stronger military position after a winter of war and power outages, with hundreds of thousands more Russian troops in the areas they control. This is a bet on a much longer war, in which U.S. taxpayers will shell out for thousands of tons of weapons and many more Ukrainians will die, with no clear endgame short of nuclear war.

#StopWar #NoWar #NuclearWar #WW3

Leaders in the global South, former U.S. diplomats and Henry Kissinger (!) agree: It’s time to negotiate for real.

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One day, we might be able to bring back to life every human ever lived, by the means of science and technology. And it will be a good day.

To the best of my knowledge, the idea was first described in detail by Fyodorov, a 19th century thinker.

Fyodorov argued that it is our moral duty to save our ancestors from the claws of death, to resurrect every human ever lived. And one day, we’ll have the technology.

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*Intelligence Beyond the Brain: morphogenesis as an example of the scaling of basal cognition*

*Description:*
Each of us takes the remarkable journey from physics to mind: we start life as a quiescent oocyte (collection of chemical reactions) and slowly change and acquire an advanced, centralized mind. How does unified complex cognition emerge from the collective intelligence of cells? In this talk, I will use morphogenesis to illustrate how evolution scales cognition across problem spaces. Embryos and regenerating organs produce very complex, robust anatomical structures and stop growth and remodeling when those structures are complete. One of the most remarkable things about morphogenesis is that it is not simply a feed-forward emergent process, but one that has massive plasticity: even when disrupted by manipulations such as damage or changing the sizes of cells, the system often manages to achieve its morphogenetic goal. How do cell collectives know what to build and when to stop? Constructing and repairing anatomies in novel circumstances is a remarkable example of the collective intelligence of a biological swarm. I propose that a multi-scale competency architecture is how evolution exploits physics to achieve robust machines that solve novel problems. I will describe what is known about developmental bioelectricity — a precursor to neurobiology which is used for cognitive binding in biological collectives, that scales their intelligence and the size of the goals they can pursue. I will also discuss the cognitive light cone model, and conclude with examples of synthetic living machines — a new biorobotics platform that uses some of these ideas to build novel primitive intelligences. I will end by speculating about ethics, engineering, and life in a future that integrates deeply across biological and synthetic agents.

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I had quite a thought-provoking discussion on modern education with Boris Zimin, the head of the Zimin Foundation, which funds education and research.

The Zimin Foundation is a non-profit organization established by the Zimin family to aid education and science. The Foundation partners with distinguished universities and funds research and educational projects that combine academic excellence with high potential for positive, real-world impact. Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Zimin Foundation has been supporting researchers and students affected by the war. I spoke with philanthropist Boris Zimin, the head of the Zimin Foundation, about his perspective on modern education.

Julia Brodsky: From your experience working with various educational funds and organizations, what do you think should be the emphasis of modern education?

Boris Zimin: While most of the world is prioritizing STEM these days, I have been contemplating the necessity of a comprehensive humanitarian and ethical emphasis in education. Consider the example of education in Soviet Russia, which was well-known around the world for providing a solid STEM background. The goal of Soviet education was to raise workers and soldiers ready for building the “communist future,” and the questions of good and evil never arose — the pre-made answers to those questions were the prerogative of the ruling communist party. Such education produces savvy technical specialists and “effective managers” who are not used to questioning the social and humanitarian consequences of their actions. And that hasn’t changed in the modern, post-Soviet period, as demonstrated by the brutality of Russian forces in Ukraine. In my opinion, education should first and foremost focus on ethics.

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What is limb regeneration and what species possess it? How is it achieved? What does this tell us about intelligence in biological systems and how could this information be exploited to develop human therapeutics? Well, in this video, we discuss many of these topics with Dr Michael Levin, Principal Investigator at Tufts University, whose lab studies anatomical and behavioural decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems.

Find Michael on Twitter — https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin.

Find me on Twitter — https://twitter.com/EleanorSheekey.

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through PayPal — https://paypal.me/sheekeyscience?country.x=GB&locale.x=en_GB
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TIMESTAMPS:
Intro — 00:00
Regeneration & Evolution — 01:30
Regrowing Limbs and Wearable Bioreactors — 09:30
Human regenerative medicine approaches — 19:20
Bioelectricity — 24:00
Problem solving in morphological space — 40:45
Where is memory stored — 44:30
Intelligence — 50:30
Xenobots & synthetic living machines — 56:00
Collective intelligence & ethics — 1:10:00
Future of human species — 1:17:00
Advice — 1:24:00

Please note that The Sheekey Science Show is distinct from Eleanor Sheekey’s teaching and research roles at the University of Cambridge. The information provided in this show is not medical advice, nor should it be taken or applied as a replacement for medical advice. The Sheekey Science Show and guests assume no liability for the application of the information discussed.

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An interdisciplinary team of researchers has developed a blueprint for creating algorithms that more effectively incorporate ethical guidelines into artificial intelligence (AI) decision-making programs. The project was focused specifically on technologies in which humans interact with AI programs, such as virtual assistants or “carebots” used in healthcare settings.

“Technologies like carebots are supposed to help ensure the safety and comfort of hospital patients, and other people who require health monitoring or physical assistance,” says Veljko Dubljević, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor in the Science, Technology & Society program at North Carolina State University. “In practical terms, this means these technologies will be placed in situations where they need to make ethical judgments.”

“For example, let’s say that a carebot is in a setting where two people require medical assistance. One patient is unconscious but requires urgent care, while the second patient is in less urgent need but demands that the carebot treat him first. How does the carebot decide which patient is assisted first? Should the carebot even treat a patient who is unconscious and therefore unable to consent to receiving the treatment?”

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So how should companies begin to think about ethical data management? What measures can they put in place to ensure that they are using consumer, patient, HR, facilities, and other forms of data appropriately across the value chain—from collection to analytics to insights?

We began to explore these questions by speaking with about a dozen global business leaders and data ethics experts. Through these conversations, we learned about some common data management traps that leaders and organizations can fall into, despite their best intentions. These traps include thinking that data ethics does not apply to your organization, that legal and compliance have data ethics covered, and that data scientists have all the answers—to say nothing of chasing short-term ROI at all costs and looking only at the data rather than their sources.

In this article, we explore these traps and suggest some potential ways to avoid them, such as adopting new standards for data management, rethinking governance models, and collaborating across disciplines and organizations. This list of potential challenges and remedies is not exhaustive; our research base was relatively small, and leaders could face many other obstacles, beyond our discussion here, to the ethical use of data. But what’s clear from our research is that data ethics needs both more and sustained attention from all members of the C-suite, including the CEO.

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