Lifeboat Foundation

When working at the Millenium Project, a global think tank that publishes reports surrounding global problems, I decided to improve the way reports were presented by ranking the actions provided by the organization to adress the problem. I focused on the 23 actions in global challenge 7 (Rich-poor gap) and created a system focusing on two aspects: feasibility and impact.

Assigning scores from 1–10 for each of these aspects made sense as an action needs to be both implemented and impactful for it to adress the problem. By researching to assign these scores and multiplying them, I could get an overall idea of where an action would compare to another one. Below is a graph summarizing my results, followed by the details behind each ranking.

1. Make higher education more easily available to all.

Feasibility: 7

Rates of higher education have doubled worldwide 19 to 38 percent over the last two decades, indicating that increased access is very possible. Although the process of making education truly available will take decades, governments clearly recognize the need for it and are taking steps towards achieving it, with education becoming a larger percent of GDP for most countries.

Impact: 8

Higher education has been known to increase earnings significantly, thereby reducing poverty. Additionally, education has been known to have various benefits towards poverty like reducing food insecurity and standards of health.

Posthumanists and perhaps especially transhumanists tend to downplay the value conflicts that are likely to emerge in the wake of a rapidly changing technoscientific landscape. What follows are six questions and scenarios that are designed to focus thinking by drawing together several tendencies that are not normally related to each other but which nevertheless provide the basis for future value conflicts.

1. Will ecological thinking eventuate in an instrumentalization of life? Generally speaking, biology – especially when a nervous system is involved — is more energy efficient when it comes to storing, accessing and processing information than even the best silicon-based computers. While we still don’t quite know why this is the case, we are nevertheless acquiring greater powers of ‘informing’ biological processes through strategic interventions, ranging from correcting ‘genetic errors’ to growing purpose-made organs, including neurons, from stem-cells. In that case, might we not ‘grow’ some organs to function in largely the same capacity as silicon-based computers – especially if it helps to reduce the overall burden that human activity places on the planet? (E.g. the brains in the vats in the film The Minority Report which engage in the precognition of crime.) In other words, this new ‘instrumentalization of life’ may be the most environmentally friendly way to prolong our own survival. But is this a good enough reason? Would these specially created organic thought-beings require legal protection or even rights? The environmental movement has been, generally speaking, against the multiplication of artificial life forms (e.g. the controversies surrounding genetically modified organisms), but in this scenario these life forms would potentially provide a means to achieve ecologically friendly goals.

2. Will concerns for social justice force us to enhance animals? We are becoming more capable of recognizing and decoding animal thoughts and feelings, a fact which has helped to bolster those concerned with animal welfare, not to mention ‘animal rights’. At the same time, we are also developing prosthetic devices (of the sort already worn by Steven Hawking) which can enhance the powers of disabled humans so their thoughts and feelings are can be communicated to a wider audience and hence enable them to participate in society more effectively. Might we not wish to apply similar prosthetics to animals – and perhaps even ourselves — in order to facilitate the transaction of thoughts and feelings between humans and animals? This proposal might aim ultimately to secure some mutually agreeable ‘social contract’, whereby animals are incorporated more explicitly in the human life-world — not as merely wards but as something closer to citizens. (See, e.g., Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Zoopolis.) However, would this set of policy initiatives constitute a violation of the animals’ species integrity and simply be a more insidious form of human domination?

Continue reading “Value Conflicts surrounding the Meaning of Life in the Trans/Post/Human Future” »

Steve Forbes sits across Brian Singer, a partner at William Blair, as Blair explains the potential of blockhain encryption to empower individuals. He also explains why credit card companies are beginning to embrace a technology that undermines their high fees.

https://youtu.be/CecpCepnkAU