I received the following questions from a UCSB student researcher and fired off the following quick answers. The questions were interesting though, and I've posted them in our forum if anyone wants to answer their own.
1.What is your primary source of information regarding current
advancements in science and technology? How well informed do you
consider your self in relation to the average person?
Newscientist magazine
Slashdot.org
Edge.org
I feel that I have a pretty good sense of current and developing science and technology. No specialty knowledge, but a solid awareness of a lot of stuff. More than my family, about the same as my friends.
2.What do you think of the future of fields in biotechnology
such as genetic engineering, AI, artificial life, transgenic species,
and technologies of reproduction?
I think they have a very secure future, with the possible exception of artificial life, which is unlikely to capture the public imagination and will thus remain a tool for biologists and their ilk.
3.What do you think of a future where man and intelligent
machines coexist?
We aren't there now?
4.What do you think of the cyborg? The posthuman?
Humans are totally cyborg. We may not be wired directly, but our dependence on electronic machines is enough to qualify it in my book. We still have a safety net of print history, but once everything is recorded digitally, we are entirely cyborg, in that our current and future knowledge are inextricably tied and dependent on the machines. If the machines go away, we likely would too.
5.What does it mean to be human?
No offense intended, but I think the term "post-human" is a ridiculous one. To be human means just that, be human. It's defined by anything that humans do as humans, bottom up, not top-down. If by post-human you are referring to Kurzweilian downloaded consciousness (a total impossibility, regardless of computing power), I would say that a downloaded consciousness is exactly that. Any "consciousness" inside a computer would have to be a product of an application that crunched the numbers for the specific personality and thus whatever it was that was inside the computer, no matter how self-aware it may seem, is simply the product of an application.
Of course, I'm not totally rigid in this thinking and reserve the right to adjust this opinion as we get closer to empirical understandings. :-)
6.What are the implications for the posthuman blurring the
distinctions of gender, race, and sexuality?
Don't we have that online already?
7.What role does consciousness play in world of biotechnology
and machines?
Personally I wish we were a bit more conscious (as in reflexive) of what we are doing and what implications it may have, but I suspect that isn't the type of consciousness you were referring to.
8.What role does evolution play, and what effect will these
technologies have on Darwinian evolution? Might biotechnology and the
merging of man and machine be the next wave in evolution?
It seems that agricultural, medical, and materials technology have almost entirely succeeded in protecting us from nature red in tooth and claw evolutionary pressures. But our increasing dependence on machines is altering how we live, perhaps to the point of survival dependence. If the machiens fail us, the species may die. I don't think its there yet, but it may become a symbiosis (not in the true sense, of course, unless you grant sentience to the machine part) even greater than we can imagine.
In closing, I'd like to recommend the book Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson. You likely are familiar with it, but I found its thesis quite intriguing and rather relevant in its own way to the theme of these questions.
Posted by Nutrimentia at October 14, 2003 02:18 AM | TrackBack