Enhancement technologies and inequality

Recognizing the variety of dystopian science-fiction novels and movies, from Brave New World to Gattaca and more recently Star Trek, on the future of humanity in which eugenic policies are implemented, genetic engineering has been getting a bad reputation for valid but arguably, mostly historical reasons. In this paper, I critically examine the claim from Mehlman & Botkin (1998: ch. 6) that human enhancement will inevitably accentuate existing inequality in a free market and analyze whether prohibition is the optimal public policy for this objection as egalitarians might advise (Lamont and Favor, 2014)

Brave new creatures : a comparative study of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the creatures of the new millenium

This thesis intends to analyse Mary Shelley‘s creature in her novel Frankenstein, and how the creation of this creature may have adumbrated the birth of present creatures—clones, genomes,1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) creatures like robots and androids—that spring from the latest technological and scientific advances. The Promethean ambition to play God in order to create life persists, and it is present today more than ever before. Within the frame of Cultural Studies and Intertextuality, I dwell upon the similarities and the differences between Mary Shelley´s creature and these ―brave new creatures.‖ Mary Shelley´s Frankenstein was provided with spiritual life and human characteristics such as suffering for love, neglect, and scorn, but the idea of the human as matter was already present in Shelley´s novel: Frankenstein was an ensemble of pieces of corpses. In this thesis I explore to which extent and how the creatures of the new millennium depart from or are similar to the original creature Frankenstein. In Brave New World (1932) Aldous Huxley had already speculated about genetic engineering, test tube babies, and a materialistic conception of human life. Today science and technology challenge us with a future new human race as the cases presented in this study. In view of all this, to ponder what the future may bring about is worth a try

The curse of Frankenstein: visions of technology and society in the debate over new reproductive technologies

At each successive moment in their development new reproductive technologies have provided the occasion for virulent argument about the role of technology in human affairs. And more generally, technoscientific knowledge has long been held both in awe and suspicion, with the latter acting as a kind of counterbalance to the continuing cultural investment in the image of scientific knowledge as empowerment, as the motive force of beneficial change. Given this cultural ambivalence the paper focuses on media representations of cloning and the 'designer baby' (with the latter enveloping a debate that has run for almost a decade now) and explores the ways utopian images of a world rendered ever more amenable to human desires have been closely shadowed by just as compelling dystopian visions which are nevertheless constructed from the same cultural material. Figures of occidental folklore such as Frankenstein (or Jeckyll or Brave New World), thus function as something of a convenient shorthand for articulating unease with the direction and pace of technological development, or even voicing loss of confidence in the modernist technoscientific project of instrumental control. In these circumstances, the chimeric notions of the 'designer baby' or the human 'clone' appear Janus-faced, concurrently representing the powers of human creativity as well as the monstrous progeny of an excessive epistemophilia. They are in this sense potent metaphors for the biotechnological revolution's declared power to re-shape both nature and society - for 'good' or 'ill'

Session 1: Eugenics Narrative and Reproductive Engineering

Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 23-24 2001 Session 1: Eugenics Narrative and Reproductive Engineerin

The future of human nature: a symposium on the promises and challenges of the revolutions in genomics and computer science, April 10, 11, and 12, 2003

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Conference Series, a publication series that began publishing in 2006 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. This was the Center's Symposium on the Promises and Challenges of the Revolutions in Genomics and Computer Science took place during April 10, 11, and 12, 2003. Co-organized by Charles DeLisi and Kenneth Lewes; sponsored by Boston University, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.This conference focused on scientific and technological advances in genetics, computer science, and their convergence during the next 35 to 250 years. In particular, it focused on directed evolution, the futures it allows, the shape of society in those futures, and the robustness of human nature against technological change at the level of individuals, groups, and societies. It is taken as a premise that biotechnology and computer science will mature and will reinforce one another. During the period of interest, human cloning, germ-line genetic engineering, and an array of reproductive technologies will become feasible and safe. Early in this period, we can reasonably expect the processing power of a laptop computer to exceed the collective processing power of every human brain on the planet; later in the period human/machine interfaces will begin to emerge. Whether such technologies will take hold is not known. But if they do, human evolution is likely to proceed at a greatly accelerated rate; human nature as we know it may change markedly, if it does not disappear altogether, and new intelligent species may well be created