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Category: ethics – Page 41

This 1,992 paper was included on best-selling CDR World Philosophy compilation (before internet) and I claim some credit for circulated it and popularising the “Transhuman sidetrack”

Since 1,988 and formation of the Posthuman Movement, and articles by early adopters like Max Moore were a sign our message was being received — although I always argued on various Extropian & Transhuman bulletin boards & Yahoo groups &c that “Trans” was a redundant middle and we should move straight to Posthuman, now armed with the new MVT knowledge (also figures on the CDR). There will be a new edition of World Philosophy, the first this millennium, to coincided with various Posthuman University events later this year. Here is the text:

THE EXTROPIAN PRINCIPLES V. 2.01 August 7 1992.

Max More Executive Director, Extropy Institute.

1. BOUNDLESS EXPANSION — Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and.
personal power, an unlimited lifespan, and removal of natural, social.
biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. Overcoming limits on our personal and social.
progress and possibilities. Expansion into the universe and infinite existence.

2. SELF-TRANSFORMATION — A commitment to continual moral.
intellectual, and physical self-improvement, using reason and critical.
thinking, personal responsibility, and experimentation. Biological and.
neurological augmentation.

3. INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY — Applying science and technology to.
transcend “natural” limits imposed by our biological heritage and environment.

4. SPONTANEOUS ORDER — Promotion of decentralized, voluntaristic.

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Google is developing a new superintelligent AI but ethical questions remain

Dean’s appearance at TED comes during a time when critics—including current Google employees —are calling for greater scrutiny over big tech’s control over the world’s AI systems. Among those critics was one who spoke right after Dean at TED. Coder Xiaowei R. Wang, creative director of the indie tech magazine Logic, argued for community-led innovations. “Within AI there is only a case for optimism if people and communities can make the case themselves, instead of people like Jeff Dean and companies like Google making the case for them, while shutting down the communities [that] AI for Good is supposed to help,” she said. (AI for Good is a movement that seeks to orient machine learning toward solving the world’s most pressing social equity problems.)

TED curator Chris Andersen and Greg Brockman, co-founder of the AI ethics research group Open AI, also wrestled with the unintended consequences of powerful machine learning systems at the end of the conference. Brockman described a scenario in which humans serve as moral guides to AI. “We can teach the system the values we want, as we would a child,” he said. “It’s an important but subtle point. I think you do need the system to learn a model of the world. If you’re teaching a child, they need to learn what good and bad is.”

There also is room for some gatekeeping to be done once the machines have been taught, Anderson suggested. “One of the key issues to keeping this thing on track is to very carefully pick the people who look at the output of these unsupervised learning systems,” he said.

Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

A New Yorker review of “Roadrunner,” a documentary about the deceased celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville, reveals that a peculiar method was used to create a voice over of an email written by Bourdain. In addition to using clips of Bourdain’s voice from various media appearances, the filmmaker says he had an “A.I. model” of Bourdain’s voice created in order to complete the effect of Bourdain ‘reading’ from his own email in the film. “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” Neville told the reviewer, Helen Rosner. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”

On Twitter, some media observers decided to start the panel right away.

“This is unsettling,” tweeted Mark Berman, a reporter at the Washington Post, while ProPublica reporter and media manipulation expert Craig Silverman tweeted “this is not okay, especially if you don’t disclose to viewers when the AI is talking.” Indeed, “The ‘ethics panel’ is supposed to happen BEFORE they release the project,” tweeted David Friend, Entertainment reporter at The Canadian Press.

UK May Ban Boiling Lobsters Alive Under “Sentient Being” Law, So Can They Really Feel Pain?

Boiling lobsters alive may be banned under a new law in the UK designed to protect the welfare rights of animals considered sentient beings. So, are lobsters sentient, do they feel pain, and what does science have to say about the moral quagmire of crustacean agony and cooking pots?

Back in May 2021, the UK government introduced a bill to formally recognize animals as sentient beings. Among the many facets of the bill, it aimed to limit the import of products from trophy hunting, push for fairer space requirements for farm animals, and stop people from owning primates as pets.

However, the bill only covered animals with a backbone and didn’t include any protections for non-vertebrates, which includes octopuses, squid, insects, and crustaceans. The Times reports that ministers are now preparing to back an amendment to the House of Lords, the upper house of the UK Parliament, to extend the legislation to shellfish and cephalopod mollusks. As per the report, this is likely to involve an outright ban on boiling lobsters alive.

5 Sustainable Eating Tips for People Serious About Life Extension

A serving of mushrooms is just 0.08 kg of CO2 emissions—only lentils have a lower per serving CO2 emission level.

One common question J.P. and I get over and over again is about the problem of overpopulation—if human life extension is a humanitarian goal worth pursuing, won’t there be an inevitable environmental crisis? One worse than what we’re already facing?

When we covered the ethics of life extension we partially answered this question based on what we know about population and consumption trends now (tl;dr: we’re more likely to face a crisis of under population than overpopulation). That said, it’s practically impossible to be able to fully forecast environmental trends 50200, and further years into the future. We noted, “Spanners actually need to address it because we will have to continue living through the consequences of climate change if we don’t.”

In other words, if you’re interested in indefinitely extending your own life, sustainable eating should be a priority today because you’ll most likely be alive in the trash-filled, resource-scarce world of tomorrow.

Are we ready? Advances in CRISPR means the era of germline gene editing has arrived

Quick, accurate and easy-to-use, CRISPR-Cas9 has made genomic editing more efficient—but at the same time has made human germline editing much more feasible, erasing many of the ethical barriers erected to prevent scientists from editing the genes of heredity.

“The ethical debate about what is now called human gene editing has gone on for more than 50 years,” writes Dr. John H. Evans, co-director of the Institute for Practical Ethics at the University of California, San Diego. “For nearly that entire time, there has been consensus that a moral divide exists between somatic and human germline editing.”

In an essay published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Evans contends that many of the potent bioethical arguments that once made germline editing a verboten concept, have begun to dissolve in the era of CRISPR.

Scientists Grew Human Cells in Monkey Embryos, and Yes, Its an Ethical Minefield

The way the team made the human–monkey embryo is similar to previous attempts at half-human chimeras.

Here’s how it goes. They used de-programmed, or “reverted,” human stem cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These cells often start from skin cells, and are chemically treated to revert to the stem cell stage, gaining back the superpower to grow into almost any type of cell: heart, lung, brain…you get the idea. The next step is preparing the monkey component, a fertilized and healthy monkey egg that develops for six days in a Petri dish. By this point, the embryo is ready for implantation into the uterus, which kicks off the whole development process.

This is where the chimera jab comes in. Using a tiny needle, the team injected each embryo with 25 human cells, and babied them for another day. “Until recently the experiment would have ended there,” wrote Drs. Hank Greely and Nita Farahany, two prominent bioethicists who wrote an accompanying expert take, but were not involved in the study.

The difficult birth of stem cell therapy

Scientists have been aware of the existence of stem cells since the 1900’s, but it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that the medical community (and in turn the public) sat up and took notice of their potential. Unfortunately, the first public debut of stem cell therapy in the eyes of the public was through the political and moral minefield of deriving stem cell lines from human embryos. It was long before religious and secular objections lead to President Bush Banning any Federal funding for studies utilising newly created stem cell lines. The public opinion of stem cells was extremely polarised, with the public split heavily down the middle, between support and condemnation. What happened next was unfortunately as predictable as the tide coming in.

To compensate for the pushback against stem cell research, more and more extravagant claims were made in support of stem cells. Although most of these claims were based upon perfectly reasonable extrapolation from what was known of the potential for stem cells, the time frame in which these advances could be made was wildly underestimated. Confounding that problem was the fact that it would be many years until a method through which stem cells could be reverse engineered from a patient’s tissue, which meant that medical treatments had to based around stem cell lines derived from embryonic stem cell lines, which as discusses previously was an ethical nightmare, as well as being logically untenable for the majority of people (as most people don’t have embryonic tissue samples stored away for future use). Great promises were made to the public, without a full understanding of what was needed in order to get stem cell therapy to a functional level.

U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Enlightenment Salon with Ryan O’Shea — May 30, 2021

Today, Sunday, May 30, 2021, at 1 p.m. Pacific Time, join us for a U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Enlightenment Salon with Ryan O’Shea, as we discuss the state of the transhumanist movement, life-extension advocacy, biohacking, Ryan’s Future Grind podcast, and more!

Watch on YouTube here:. You will be able to post questions and comments in the live YouTube chat.

On Sunday, May 30, 2021, at 1 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time, the U.S. Transhumanist Party invites Ryan O’Shea for a Virtual Enlightenment Salon to discuss a wide array of subjects related to transhumanism, including the state of the contemporary transhumanist movement, Ryan O’Shea’s Future Grind podcast, biohacking, the Human Augmentation Institute and the Human Augmentation Code of Ethics, Ryan O’Shea’s media work with the Lifespan Extension Advocacy Foundation with the goal of popularizing life-extension science, how to respond to common criticisms of transhumanism, thoughts on consciousness and free will, and strategies for advancing the transhumanist movement in the future.

Ryan O’Shea is an entrepreneur and futurist speaker from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the host of Future Grind — https://futuregrind.org/ — a multimedia production company that seeks to increase technoliteracy and democratize access to information about emerging technologies, enabling more voices to be a part of the societal conversation surrounding technology. Ryan is also a founder of the Human Augmentation Institute, an organization focused on upholding bodily autonomy and ensuring that any efforts in human augmentation are done ethically, safely, and responsibly. He also serves as the spokesperson for Grindhouse Wetware, a group specializing in technology to augment human capabilities. In 2017, Ryan co-founded a National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation-supported artificial intelligence startup that is working to use machine learning and automated just-in-time intervention for behavior change. Ryan has represented NASA and CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a Solar System Ambassador and serves both as a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and an ambassador for Pittsburgh AI. He is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and currently serves on the boards of multiple non-profit organizations.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside: https://transhumanist-party.org/membership.

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