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

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Would You Become An Immortal Machine?

Marcelo Gleiser
npr.org
Originally posted March 27, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

"A man is a god in ruins," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. This quote, which O'Connell places at the book's opening page, captures the essence of the quest. If man is a failed god, there may be a way to fix this. Since "The Fall," we "lost" our god-like immortality, and have been looking for ways to regain it. Can science do this? Is mortality merely a scientific question? Suppose that it is — and that we can fix it, as we can a headache. Would you pay the price by transferring your "essence" to a non-human entity that will hold it, be it silicone or some kind of artificial robot? Can you be you when you don't have your body? Are you really just transferrable information?

As O'Connell meets an extraordinary group of people, from serious scientists and philosophers to wackos, he keeps asking himself this question, knowing fully well his answer: Absolutely not! What makes us human is precisely our fallibility, our connection to our bodies, the existential threat of death. Remove that and we are a huge question mark, something we can't even contemplate. No thanks, says O'Connell, in a deliciously satiric style, at once lyrical, informative, and captivating.

The article is here.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

What if a bionic leg is so good that someone chooses to amputate?

By Jemima Kiss
The Guardian
Originally published April 9, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Bionics will become so appealing that some people may choose to amputate just so that they can augment their bodies; our own legs might begin to feel heavy and stupid, he thinks. Given cosmetic surgery now, how would we feel about going under the knife for an arguably more justifiable benefit? This raises some intensely challenging issues about whether we will see a far more profound human digital divide, already hinted at in sci-fi countless times: the augmented, and the unaugmented.

In this view of the body as a biological machine, the parts that don’t work can be replaced, improved, remodelled.

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Automated ethics

When is it ethical to hand our decisions over to machines? And when is external automation a step too far?

by Tom Chatfield
Aeon Magazine
Originally published March 31, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Automation, in this context, is a force pushing old principles towards breaking point. If I can build a car that will automatically avoid killing a bus full of children, albeit at great risk to its driver’s life, should any driver be given the option of disabling this setting? And why stop there: in a world that we can increasingly automate beyond our reaction times and instinctual reasoning, should we trust ourselves even to conduct an assessment in the first place?

Beyond the philosophical friction, this last question suggests another reason why many people find the trolley disturbing: because its consequentialist resolution presents not only the possibility that an ethically superior action might be calculable via algorithm (not in itself a controversial claim) but also that the right algorithm can itself be an ethically superior entity to us.

The entire article is here.