Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Life. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 8, 2023

Everything you need to know about artificial wombs

Cassandra Willyard
MIT Technology Review
Originally posted 29 SEPT 23

Here is an excerpt:

What is an artificial womb?

An artificial womb is an experimental medical device intended to provide a womblike environment for extremely premature infants. In most of the technologies, the infant would float in a clear “biobag,” surrounded by fluid. The idea is that preemies could spend a few weeks continuing to develop in this device after birth, so that “when they’re transitioned from the device, they’re more capable of surviving and having fewer complications with conventional treatment,” says George Mychaliska, a pediatric surgeon at the University of Michigan.

One of the main limiting factors for survival in extremely premature babies is lung development. Rather than breathing air, babies in an artificial womb would have their lungs filled with lab-made amniotic fluid, that mimics the amniotic fluid they would have hadjust like they would in utero. Neonatologists would insert tubes into blood vessels in the umbilical cord so that the infant’s blood could cycle through an artificial lung to pick up oxygen. 

The device closest to being ready to be tested in humans, called the EXTrauterine Environment for Newborn Development, or EXTEND, encases the baby in a container filled with lab-made amniotic fluid. It was invented by Alan Flake and Marcus Davey at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and is being developed by Vitara Biomedical.


Here is my take:

Artificial wombs are experimental medical devices that aim to provide a womb-like environment for extremely premature infants. The technology is still in its early stages of development, but it has the potential to save the lives of many babies who would otherwise not survive.

Overall, artificial wombs are a promising new technology with the potential to revolutionize the care of premature infants. However, more research is needed to fully understand the risks and benefits of the technology before it can be widely used.

Here are some additional ethical concerns that have been raised about artificial wombs:
  • The potential for artificial wombs to be used to create designer babies or to prolong the lives of fetuses with severe disabilities.
  • The potential for artificial wombs to be used to exploit or traffick babies.
  • The potential for artificial wombs to exacerbate existing social and economic inequalities.
It is important to have a public conversation about these ethical concerns before artificial wombs become widely available. We need to develop clear guidelines for how the technology should be used and ensure that it is used in a way that benefits all of society.

Thursday, December 22, 2022

In the corner of an Australian lab, a brain in a dish is playing a video game - and it’s getting better

Liam Mannix
Sydney Morning Herald
Originally posted 13 NOV 22

Here is an excerpt:

Artificial intelligence controls an ever-increasing slice of our lives. Smart voice assistants hang on our every word. Our phones leverage machine learning to recognise our face. Our social media lives are controlled by algorithms that surface content to keep us hooked.

These advances are powered by a new generation of AIs built to resemble human brains. But none of these AIs are really intelligent, not in the human sense of the word. They can see the superficial pattern without understanding the underlying concept. Siri can read you the weather but she does not really understand that it’s raining. AIs are good at learning by rote, but struggle to extrapolate: even teenage humans need only a few sessions behind the wheel before the can drive, while Google’s self-driving car still isn’t ready after 32 billion kilometres of practice.

A true ‘general artificial intelligence’ remains out of reach - and, some scientists think, impossible.

Is this evidence human brains can do something special computers never will be able to? If so, the DishBrain opens a new path forward. “The only proof we have of a general intelligence system is done with biological neurons,” says Kagan. “Why would we try to mimic what we could harness?”

He imagines a future part-silicon-part-neuron supercomputer, able to combine the raw processing power of silicon with the built-in learning ability of the human brain.

Others are more sceptical. Human intelligence isn’t special, they argue. Thoughts are just electro-chemical reactions spreading across the brain. Ultimately, everything is physics - we just need to work out the maths.

“If I’m building a jet plane, I don’t need to mimic a bird. It’s really about getting to the mathematical foundations of what’s going on,” says Professor Simon Lucey, director of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning.

Why start the DishBrains on Pong? I ask. Because it’s a game with simple rules that make it ideal for training AI. And, grins Kagan, it was one of the first video game ever coded. A nod to the team’s geek passions - which run through the entire project.

“There’s a whole bunch of sci-fi history behind it. The Matrix is an inspiration,” says Chong. “Not that we’re trying to create a Matrix,” he adds quickly. “What are we but just a goooey soup of neurons in our heads, right?”

Maybe. But the Matrix wasn’t meant as inspiration: it’s a cautionary tale. The humans wired into it existed in a simulated reality while machines stole their bioelectricity. They were slaves.

Is it ethical to build a thinking computer and then restrict its reality to a task to be completed? Even if it is a fun task like Pong?

“The real life correlate of that is people have already created slaves that adore them: they are called dogs,” says Oxford University’s Julian Savulescu.

Thousands of years of selective breeding has turned a wild wolf into an animal that enjoys rounding up sheep, that loves its human master unconditionally.

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Understanding "longtermism": Why this suddenly influential philosophy is so toxic

Émile P. Torres
Salon.com
Originally posted 20 AUG 22

Here is an excerpt:

But what is longtermism? I have tried to answer that in other articles, and will continue to do so in future ones. A brief description here will have to suffice: Longtermism is a quasi-religious worldview, influenced by transhumanism and utilitarian ethics, which asserts that there could be so many digital people living in vast computer simulations millions or billions of years in the future that one of our most important moral obligations today is to take actions that ensure as many of these digital people come into existence as possible.

In practical terms, that means we must do whatever it takes to survive long enough to colonize space, convert planets into giant computer simulations and create unfathomable numbers of simulated beings. How many simulated beings could there be? According to Nick Bostrom —the Father of longtermism and director of the Future of Humanity Institute — there could be at least 1058 digital people in the future, or a 1 followed by 58 zeros. Others have put forward similar estimates, although as Bostrom wrote in 2003, "what matters … is not the exact numbers but the fact that they are huge."

In this article, however, I don't want to focus on how bizarre and dangerous this ideology is and could be. Instead, I think it would be useful to take a look at the community out of which longtermism emerged, focusing on the ideas of several individuals who helped shape the worldview that MacAskill and others are now vigorously promoting. The most obvious place to start is with Bostrom, whose publications in the early 2000s — such as his paper "Astronomical Waste," which was recently retweeted by Musk — planted the seeds that have grown into the kudzu vine crawling over the tech sector, world governments and major media outlets like the New York Times and TIME.

Nick Bostrom is, first of all, one of the most prominent transhumanists of the 21st century so far. Transhumanism is an ideology that sees humanity as a work in progress, as something that we can and should actively reengineer, using advanced technologies like brain implants, which could connect our brains to the Internet, and genetic engineering, which could enable us to create super-smart designer babies. We might also gain immortality through life-extension technologies, and indeed many transhumanists have signed up with Alcor to have their bodies (or just their heads and necks, which is cheaper) frozen after they die so that they can be revived later on, in a hypothetical future where that's possible. Bostrom himself wears a metal buckle around his ankle with instructions for Alcor to "take custody of his body and maintain it in a giant steel bottle flooded with liquid nitrogen" after he dies.

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Ashoka’s moral empire

Sam Haselby
aeon.com
Originally posted 2 July 20

Here is an excerpt:

At the heart of Ashoka’s ethical project is a concern to bring other beings and their possibilities into view. Consider different ways in which living beings might be excluded from our regard. For example, it is only when we see animals as entirely outside of our moral and political community that it’s possible to see them as meat. In the edicts, we find a concern with how the incarcerated, for greater or lesser periods of time, can also fall out of our consideration as fellow members of our moral community. Housed out of sight, we don’t see them, just as in a metaphorical sense we fail to see them when we treat them as less than us.

As an antidote, Ashoka encouraged his bureaucrats to develop a moral responsiveness with respect to the incarcerated. He says that if his ministers think ‘This one has a family to support,’ or ‘This one has been bewitched,’ or ‘This one is old,’ then they will see them anew, and can work to rehabilitate and reintegrate such a reconsidered prisoner in society. The challenge, Ashoka suggests, begins in our imagination: we must learn to see them entire. In fact, in the case of prisoners, refugees from war, internally displaced peoples, and animals – vulnerable beings, all – Ashoka recommends an imaginative experiment: to see them as individuals who maintain and value relationships with others of their kind, if not with us.

And that is key. The logic of Ashoka’s proscriptions on hunting, fishing and cruelty in animal husbandry in his fifth-pillar inscription can show us why. There, Ashoka suggests that living beings require a secure place in which to thrive, and that different types of places suit different types of beings (such as forests, rivers, or even husks for small-scaled life). He implies that all living beings exhibit different kinds of vulnerabilities and opportunities at various stages of life or at different times of the year (as when fish spawn only in certain lunar months, or sows are in milk). Living beings have patterns of dependency without which they would not be able to survive. By virtue of being a necessity for the flourishing of life, each context, pattern or stage of dependency acquires a moral status.

The info is here.

Friday, August 30, 2019

Cryonics: Medicine, Or The Modern Mummy?

Patrick Lin
Futuristic cryo-pod. Photocredit: GettyForbes.com
Originally posted July 8, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Meanwhile, others argued that death is a natural and necessary part of the circle of life.  Ecologically, keeping people around long past their “natural lives” may upset an already fragile balance, potentially exacerbating overpopulation, resource consumption, waste, and so on.

This is to suggest that cryonics isn’t just a difference in degree from, say, saving heart-attack victims, but it becomes a difference in kind.  It’s not an incremental improvement, as medicine makes in slowly raising average lifespans, but it's potentially a radical disruption with major systemic effects.

Culturally, Joseph Weizenbaum— who was a MIT computer science professor and creator of ELIZA—wrote, “Our death is the last service we can provide to the world:  Would we not go out of the way, the following generations would not need to re-create human culture.  Culture would become fixed, unchangeable and die.  And with the death of culture, humanity would also perish.”

Beyond external effects, the desire for more life may express bad character.  Wanting more than one’s fair share—of life or anything else—seems egotistical and expresses ingratitude for what we already have.  If not for death, we might not appreciate our time on earth.  We appreciate many things, such as beauty and flowers, not despite their impermanence but because of it.

Thursday, May 2, 2019

Part-revived pig brains raise slew of ethical quandaries

Nita A. Farahany, Henry T. Greely & Charles M. Giattino
Nature
Originally published April 17, 2019

Scientists have restored and preserved some cellular activities and structures in the brains of pigs that had been decapitated for food production four hours before. The researchers saw circulation in major arteries and small blood vessels, metabolism and responsiveness to drugs at the cellular level and even spontaneous synaptic activity in neurons, among other things. The team formulated a unique solution and circulated it through the isolated brains using a network of pumps and filters called BrainEx. The solution was cell-free, did not coagulate and contained a haemoglobin-based oxygen carrier and a wide range of pharmacological agents.

The remarkable study, published in this week’s Nature, offers the promise of an animal or even human whole-brain model in which many cellular functions are intact. At present, cells from animal and human brains can be sustained in culture for weeks, but only so much can be gleaned from isolated cells. Tissue slices can provide snapshots of local structural organization, yet they are woefully inadequate for questions about function and global connectivity, because much of the 3D structure is lost during tissue preparation.

The work also raises a host of ethical issues. There was no evidence of any global electrical activity — the kind of higher-order brain functioning associated with consciousness. Nor was there any sign of the capacity to perceive the environment and experience sensations. Even so, because of the possibilities it opens up, the BrainEx study highlights potential limitations in the current regulations for animals used in research.

The info is here.

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Should animals, plants, and robots have the same rights as you?

Sigal Samuel
www.vox.com
Originally posted April 4, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

The moral circle is a fundamental concept among philosophers, psychologists, activists, and others who think seriously about what motivates people to do good. It was introduced by historian William Lecky in the 1860s and popularized by philosopher Peter Singer in the 1980s.

Now it’s cropping up more often in activist circles as new social movements use it to make the case for granting rights to more and more entities. Animals. Nature. Robots. Should they all get rights similar to the ones you enjoy? For example, you have the right not to be unjustly imprisoned (liberty) and the right not to be experimented on (bodily integrity). Maybe animals should too.

If you’re tempted to dismiss that notion as absurd, ask yourself: How do you decide whether an entity deserves rights?

Many people think that sentience, the ability to feel sensations like pain and pleasure, is the deciding factor. If that’s the case, what degree of sentience is required to make the cut? Maybe you think we should secure legal rights for chimpanzees and elephants — as the Nonhuman Rights Project is aiming to do — but not for, say, shrimp.

Some people think sentience is the wrong litmus test; they argue we should include anything that’s alive or that supports living things. Maybe you think we should secure rights for natural ecosystems, as the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is doing. Lake Erie won legal personhood status in February, and recent years have seen rights granted to rivers and forests in New Zealand, India, and Colombia.

The info is here.

Monday, April 29, 2019

Nova Scotia to become 1st in North America with presumed consent for organ donation

Michael Gorman
www.cbc.com
Originally posted April 2, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Premier Stephen McNeil said the bill fills a need within the province, noting Nova Scotia has some of the highest per capita rates of willing donors in the country.

"That doesn't always translate into the actual act of giving," he said.

"We know that there are many ways that we can continue to improve the system that we have."

McNeil pledged to put the necessary services in place to allow the province's donor program to live up to the promise of the legislation.

"We know that in many parts of our province — including the one I live in, which is a rural part of Nova Scotia — we have work to do," he said.

"I will make sure that the work that is required to build the system and supports around this will happen."

The bill will not be proclaimed right away.

Health Minister Randy Delorey said government officials would spend 12-18 months educating the public about the change and working on getting health-care workers the support they need to enhance the program.

Even with the change, Delorey said, people should continue making their wishes known to loved ones, so there can be no question about intentions.

The info is here.

Sunday, April 14, 2019

Scientists Grew a Mini-Brain in a Dish, And It Connected to a Spinal Cord by Itself

Carly Cassella
www.sciencealert.com
Originally posted March 20, 2019

Lab-growing the most complex structure in the known Universe may sound like an impossible task, but that hasn't stopped scientists from trying.

After years of work, researchers in the UK have now cultivated one of the most sophisticated miniature brains-in-a-dish yet, and it actually managed to behave in a slightly freaky fashion.

The grey blob was composed of about two million organised neurons, which is similar to the human foetal brain at 12 to 13 weeks. At this stage, this so-called 'brain organoid' is not complex enough to have any thoughts, feelings, or consciousness - but that doesn't make it entirely inert.

When placed next to a piece of mouse spinal cord and a piece of mouse muscle tissue, this disembodied, pea-sized blob of human brain cells sent out long, probing tendrils to check out its new neighbours.

Using long-term live microscopy, researchers were able to watch as the mini-brain spontaneously connected itself to the nearby spinal cord and muscle tissue.

The info is here.

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Gov. Newsom to order halt to California’s death penalty

Bob Egelko and Alexei Koseff
San Francisco Chronicle
Originally posted March 12, 2019

Gov. Gavin Newsom is suspending the death penalty in California, calling it discriminatory and immoral, and is granting reprieves to the 737 condemned inmates on the nation’s largest Death Row.

“I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people,” Newsom said in a statement accompanying an executive order, to be issued Wednesday, declaring a moratorium on capital punishment in the state. “The death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian.”

He plans to order an immediate shutdown of the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison, where the last execution was carried out in 2006. Newsom is also withdrawing California’s recently revised procedures for executions by lethal injection, ending — at least for now — the struggle by prison officials for more than a decade to devise procedures that would pass muster in federal court by minimizing the risk of a botched and painful execution.

The info is here.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Are embryos people? The answer will determine the future of reproductive medicine

Eric Forman
Statnews.com
Originally posted July 24, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The goal of this process is to achieve a healthy child, which now occurs at a remarkably high rate. For specific genetic disorders, preimplantation genetic testing can reduce the odds of having a child with a lethal disorder from 25 to 50 percent to less than 1 percent.

Medicine’s ability to culture embryos and select healthy ones has improved dramatically in the last few years. A clinical trial that I led several years ago showed that transferring a single genetically tested normal embryo resulted in the same delivery rate as transferring multiple untested embryos. When genetic testing is performed, it is now standard of care to transfer just a single embryo at a time — gone are the days of risky triplet and high-order multiples after IVF. Actual babies, not embryos, are being spared from dying from the complications of genetic diseases and severe prematurity thanks to the increased use of single-embryo transfer afforded by preimplantation genetic testing.

The information is here.

Monday, February 5, 2018

A Robot Goes to College

Lindsay McKenzie
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published December 21, 2017

A robot called Bina48 has successfully taken a course in the philosophy of love at Notre Dame de Namur University, in California.

According to course instructor William Barry, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Mixed Reality Immersive Learning and Research Lab at NDNU, Bina48 is the world’s first socially advanced robot to complete a college course, a feat he described as “remarkable.” The robot took part in class discussions, gave a presentation with a student partner and participated in a debate with students from another institution.

(cut)

Barry said that working with Bina48 had been a valuable experience for him and his students. “We need to get over our existential fear about robots and see them as an opportunity,” he said. “If we approach artificial intelligence with a sense of the dignity and sacredness of all life, then we will produce robots with those same values,” he said.

The information is here.

Thursday, November 9, 2017

You Don’t Find Your Purpose — You Build It

John Coleman
Harvard Business Review
Originally published October 20, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

In achieving professional purpose, most of us have to focus as much on making our work meaningful as in taking meaning from it. Put differently, purpose is a thing you build, not a thing you find. Almost any work can possess remarkable purpose. School bus drivers bear enormous responsibility — caring for and keeping safe dozens of children — and are an essential part of assuring our children receive the education they need and deserve. Nurses play an essential role not simply in treating people’s medical conditions but also in guiding them through some of life’s most difficult times. Cashiers can be a friendly, uplifting interaction in someone’s day — often desperately needed — or a forgettable or regrettable one. But in each of these instances, purpose is often primarily derived from focusing on what’s so meaningful and purposeful about the job and on doing it in such a way that that meaning is enhanced and takes center stage. Sure, some jobs more naturally lend themselves to senses of meaning, but many require at least some deliberate effort to invest them with the purpose we seek.

(cut)

Most of us will have multiple sources of purpose in our lives. For me, I find purpose in my children, my marriage, my faith, my writing, my work, and my community. For almost everyone, there’s no one thing we can find. It’s not purpose but purposes we are looking for — the multiple sources of meaning that help us find value in our work and lives. Professional commitments are only one component of this meaning, and often our work isn’t central to our purpose but a means to helping others, including our families and communities. Acknowledging these multiple sources of purpose takes the pressure off of finding a single thing to give our lives meaning.

The article is here.

Monday, May 23, 2016

Why this lab-grown human embryo has reignited an old ethical debate

By Patrick Monahan
Science
May. 4, 2016

It’s easy to obey a rule when you don’t have the means to break it. For decades, many countries have permitted human embryos to be studied in the laboratory only up to 14 days after their creation by in vitro fertilization. But—as far as anyone knows—no researcher has ever come close to the limit. The point of implantation, when the embryo attaches to the uterus about 7 days after fertilization, has been an almost insurmountable barrier for researchers culturing human embryos.

Now, two teams report growing human embryos about a week past that point. Beyond opening a new window on human biology, such work could help explain early miscarriages caused by implantation gone awry. As a result, some scientists and bioethicists contend that it’s time to revisit the so-called 14-day rule. But that won’t be welcomed by those who consider the rule to have a firm moral grounding—or by those who oppose any research on human embryos.

The article is here.