DESIGNING AUGMENTED SPORTS: TEAM GAMES WITH A BALL

電気通信大学202

Freedom of Thought at the Ethical Frontier of Law & Science

Some of the most compelling contemporary ethical questions surround 21st Century neuroscientific technologies. Among these, neurocognitive intervention technologies allow an unprecedented ability to alter thought. Concerns exist about their impact on individual freedom, behavior and personhood. They could also distort society, eroding core values of dignity, equality, and diversity. Potent laws are needed to anchor regulation in this rising field. The article explores how the long-neglected human right of Freedom of Thought might protect the integrity of the mind at the legal system’s highest level. Sample cases illustrate how it could be given effect ethically and legally to set boundaries for neurocognitive intervention

Human Enhancement Technologies and Our Merger with Machines

A cross-disciplinary approach is offered to consider the challenge of emerging technologies designed to enhance human bodies and minds. Perspectives from philosophy, ethics, law, and policy are applied to a wide variety of enhancements, including integration of technology within human bodies, as well as genetic, biological, and pharmacological modifications. Humans may be permanently or temporarily enhanced with artificial parts by manipulating (or reprogramming) human DNA and through other enhancement techniques (and combinations thereof). We are on the cusp of significantly modifying (and perhaps improving) the human ecosystem. This evolution necessitates a continuing effort to re-evaluate current laws and, if appropriate, to modify such laws or develop new laws that address enhancement technology. A legal, ethical, and policy response to current and future human enhancements should strive to protect the rights of all involved and to recognize the responsibilities of humans to other conscious and living beings, regardless of what they look like or what abilities they have (or lack). A potential ethical approach is outlined in which rights and responsibilities should be respected even if enhanced humans are perceived by non-enhanced (or less-enhanced) humans as “no longer human” at all

Vision 21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace

The symposium Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace was held at the NASA Lewis Research Center on March 30-31, 1993. The purpose of the symposium was to simulate interdisciplinary thinking in the sciences and technologies which will be required for exploration and development of space over the next thousand years. The keynote speakers were Hans Moravec, Vernor Vinge, Carol Stoker, and Myron Krueger. The proceedings consist of transcripts of the invited talks and the panel discussion by the invited speakers, summaries of workshop sessions, and contributed papers by the attendees

Militarism, Security, and War: The Politics of Contemporary Hollywood Superheroes

In the fields of political science and international relations, engagement with popular culture has been deemed predominantly un-important and irrelevant as an area of study. This dissertation interrogates one of the most popular cultural icons of the early 21st century, the fictional Hollywood superhero, and asks what it does for us to take seriously that which is often deemed frivolous entertainment. Understanding the superhero as a political entity in and of itself, this project reveals the mutually constitutive relationship between its production, consumption and reproduction and particular ideologies around militarism, security and war. Acknowledging the complexities of superhero characters, narratives, and aesthetics such as subversive and contested elements, this project reveals superheroes as potential sites of political and ideological reflection, articulation, constitution, and transgression. This project demonstrates that a pop cultural/aesthetic approach to IR can enable critical practices that contribute to complicating and enhancing our understandings of war and politics

Study and development of sensorimotor interfaces for robotic human augmentation

This thesis presents my research contribution to robotics and haptics in the context of human augmentation. In particular, in this document, we are interested in bodily or sensorimotor augmentation, thus the augmentation of humans by supernumerary robotic limbs (SRL). The field of sensorimotor augmentation is new in robotics and thanks to the combination with neuroscience, great leaps forward have already been made in the past 10 years. All of the research work I produced during my Ph.D. focused on the development and study of fundamental technology for human augmentation by robotics: the sensorimotor interface. This new concept is born to indicate a wearable device which has two main purposes, the first is to extract the input generated by the movement of the user's body, and the second to provide the somatosensory system of the user with an haptic feedback. This thesis starts with an exploratory study of integration between robotic and haptic devices, intending to combine state-of-the-art devices. This allowed us to realize that we still need to understand how to improve the interface that will allow us to feel the agency when using an augmentative robot. At this point, the path of this thesis forks into two alternative ways that have been adopted to improve the interaction between the human and the robot. In this regard, the first path we presented tackles two aspects conerning the haptic feedback of sensorimotor interfaces, which are the choice of the positioning and the effectiveness of the discrete haptic feedback. In the second way we attempted to lighten a supernumerary finger, focusing on the agility of use and the lightness of the device. One of the main findings of this thesis is that haptic feedback is considered to be helpful by stroke patients, but this does not mitigate the fact that the cumbersomeness of the devices is a deterrent to their use. Preliminary results here presented show that both the path we chose to improve sensorimotor augmentation worked: the presence of the haptic feedback improves the performance of sensorimotor interfaces, the co-positioning of haptic feedback and the input taken from the human body can improve the effectiveness of these interfaces, and creating a lightweight version of a SRL is a viable solution for recovering the grasping function

Philosophical and ethical questions concerning technology in sport : the case of genetic modification

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A supreme fire of thought and spirit : modernist patterns of cultural renewal in First World War Britain

This thesis seeks to analyse a highly diverse range of intellectuals operating in Britain during the First World War through a "maximalist" model of modernism. This ideal type identifies modernist qualities in radical politics, religious faith, spirituality and philosophy, as well as aesthetic innovation. From this perspective, it demonstrates a gap in the exploration of the modernist dynamic of the British intelligentsia during the First World War in the current secondary literature. Further, it offers an ideal type of modernism that characterises the phenomenon as thought marked by a radical confrontation with an intetpretation of modernity as decadence. The first three chapters of the study explore this phenomenon through a wide-ranging textual recovery of various wartime debates published in the avant-garde journal The New Age. The first chapter offers a survey of the philosophical and political modernism articulated by A. R. Orage, the editor of The New Age, which took the form of a fusion of Nietzsche with the neo-Marxist ideology guild socialism. The second chapter offers further textual recovery of other guild socialist ideologues who published in The New Age, including S. G. Hobson, G. D. H. Cole, Ivor Brown and A. J. Penty. The final chapter on The New Age completes this textual recovery and examines essays published by other contributors, including the promotion of Nietzsche by Oscar Levy and A. E. R., alongside the modernist thinking of figures such as Herbert Read, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Janko Lavrin, and Ramiro de Maeztu. Following this in depth survey of The New Age, the study examines the wartime writings of H. G. Wells, focusing on how the war led him to propose his own modernist religion as a solution to wartime modernity's alleged decadence. Having located modernist qualities in Wells' wartime non-fiction and fiction, chapter five explores the ideas of May Sinclair, who not only proposed a new variant of philosophical idealism that fused mysticism and new developments in psychoanalysis, but articulated this philosophy in her wartime novels, especially The Tree of Heaven. The final chapter examines three British war poets, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke, arguing that each developed their own idiosyncratic confrontation with a decadent modernity during the war. This analysis examines both their poetry and their wider attitudes and responses to the conflagration. The study concludes by arguing that modernist cultural production in Britain chimed with wider European patterns in wartime and postwar culture and ideology. Further, drawing on cultural anthropology, it stresses that significant aspects of European culture were thrown into a profound state of liminality by the First World War, resulting in myriad attempts by modernists either to revitalise modernity through radical ideologies and cultural production, or to forward ideas that used a profound sense of cultural decline and fragmentation to explore the deeper significances of living in a decadent modernity. Further, it suggests that the "maximalist" definition of modernism forwarded by the thesis could be used to explore other instances of modernist cultural production articulated during the first half of the twentieth century