When?
March 28-29, 2009
Where?
Western Michigan University, Fetzer Center
Why?
The Human Enhancement & Nanotechnology Conference focuses on the ethical, social, and related issues that arise in the application of nanotechnology to human enhancement. While nanotechnology is not the only technology that can be applied to human enhancement, it is and will be a core one; without it many current and future enhancements would not be possible. These technological possibilities will derive from many sources, especially nanoelectronics and nanomaterials.
As an example of an ethical issue, bionic limbs (e.g., for greater strength or vision) and neural chips implanted into one’s head (e.g., for on-demand access to the Internet and software applications) may give the individual significant advantages in many areas, from sports to jobs to academia. But these technologies may hold health risks—similar to steroid or Ritalin use for enhancement purposes, as distinct from therapy—as well as raise ethical concerns related to fairness, access, and general societal disruption. Therefore, it is no surprise that, on both sides of the debate, the ethics of human enhancement is believed to be the single most important issue in science & society in this century.
Who?
The conference will offer presentations by leading researchers and rising stars in the field, from such places as:
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How?
The conference is organized by faculty at California Polytechnic State Univ., Dartmouth College, Univ. of Delaware, and Western Michigan University. It is supported by funding from Western Michigan Univ. as well as the US National Science Foundation, under NSF awards # 0620694 and 0621021, as well as Delaware NSF-EPSCoR grant # EPS-0447610.
Registration
The conference is free to attend and includes continental breakfasts, lunches, and a good supply of coffee and snacks (to enhance our minds and bodies). Online registration is now closed.
Program
Saturday, March 28
8:45-9:30a – Registration and continental breakfast
9:30-9:45a – Introduction by Fritz Allhoff (Western Michigan Univ.)
9:45-10:30a – Rebecca Roache (Oxford): “Ethics, Speculation, and Values”
10:30-11:15a – Nicole Hassoun (Carnegie Mellon): “Nanotechnology, Enhancement, and Human Nature”
11:15a-12:00p – Idil Boran (York Univ.): “Foundational Questions about Justice and the Idea of Human Enhancement”
12:00:-1:00p – Lunch
1:00-1:45p – Ron Sandler (Northeastern Univ.): “Enhancing Justice?”
1:45-2:30p – Linda MacDonald-Glenn (Albany School of Medicine) and Jeanann S. Boyce (Montgomery College): “Not Just a Pretty Face: Legal and Ethical Issues in Regenerative Nanomedicine”
2:30-3:15p – Daniel Moore (IBM): “Human Enhancement & Military”
3:15-3:45p – Break
3:45-4:30p – Tihamer Toth-Fejel (General Dynamics): “Nanotechnology and Productive Nanosystems for the U.S. Military: Progress and Implications”
4:30-5:15p – Colin Allen (Indiana Univ.): “Goggles vs. Implants: Why Cognitive Nanoethics Just Ain’t in the Head”
5:15-6:00p – Wendell Wallach (Yale): “Public Policy and Human Enhancement: When should new technologies be embraced and when should they be rejected or regulated?”
Sunday, March 29
8:45-9:30a – Continental breakfast
9:30-10:15a – Sean Hays (Arizona State Univ.): “Nietzsche and the Philosophical Underpinnings of Human Enhancement”
10:15-11:00a – Carlos Melendez (Michigan State Univ.): “Looking Forward to Enhancement: Ethical Thinking Before It’s Too Late”
11:00-11:15a – Break
11:15-12:00p – Richard Robeson (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): “Parallax: The Blind Spot Created by the Therapy vs. Enhancement Dichotomy in Sports Ethics”
12:00-12:45p – James Hughes (Trinity College): “Technoprogressive Policies to Ensure Enhancement Technologies are Safe and Accessible”
12:45-1:00p – Closing remarks
1:00p – Optional Lunch
Speakers
Colin Allen
Goggles vs. Implants: Why Cognitive Nanoethics Just Ain’t in the Head
For under $5,000 one can already purchase a computer the size of a cigarette pack that is 10-15 times more powerful than the average desktop machine and can be worn on one’s belt. When combined with a heads-up VR display, these systems are being used to serve up a virtually-enhanced reality — a capability that the U.S. military is already developing in order to train soldiers by blending virtual combatants into real physical environments. Networks of these wearable supercomputers will enhance humans in ways that we can barely imagine, and nanoscale computing will further extend the possibilities for enhancing ordinary sensory input with computer-mediated and computer-generated information. Because these augmented reality devices use (at least three of) the familiar five senses, they don’t depend on the development of new neural-technological interfaces that are required by implants. Implants will continue to be developed, especially for people whose medical conditions mean that standard sensory routes are impaired. But because of the technological hurdles facing neural implants I surmise that goggles will deliver nanocomputer-based cognitive enhancements to most humans sooner than implants. Although the idea of embedding nanocomputers into our bodies has captured the imaginations of many futurists and nanoethicists, I will suggest that the actual issues for cognitive nanoethics may be somewhat different from what they’ve imagined.
Colin Allen is Professor of History & Philosophy of Science and Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has been a faculty member since 2004. He also holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Philosophy, and is a faculty member of IU’s Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. His main area of research is on the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, particularly with respect to nonhuman animals. He is interested in the scientific debates between ethology and comparative psychology, and current issues arising in cognitive ethology. Allen has also published on other topics in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology, and artificial intelligence. His most recent book is Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Oxford University Press 2009), coauthored with Wendell Wallach.
Idil Boran
Foundational Questions about Justice and the Idea of Human Enhancement
In this paper, my aim is to look for an appropriate framework of inquiry for questions of justice and fairness that may arise from innovations in human enhancement technologies. My interest here is more on methodological questions than on first-order analysis of what may or may not be right about certain human enhancement technologies. I will consider Kantian constructivism, a specific approach whereby normative principles are identified by examining first the concrete circumstances that give rise to problems of justice and fairness. I will show that Kantian constructivism offers a sound methodological approach, and allows us to frame the normative problems appropriately. The discussion will be conducted with special focus on the idea of enhancing physical endowments associated with physical attractiveness, which are now being recognized as providing competitive advantage not just for attracting potential mates but also for professional success and social status. Overall, my goal is to offer philosophical groundwork on how to formulate the questions of justice and public policy arising from human enhancement technologies, and identify guidelines for future research.
Idil Boran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her research interests are in political philosophy, philosophy and public policy, applied ethics, including economic ethics and business ethics. She also has a long-time interest in issues in philosophy of science, science and technology, logic, and empiricism.
Nicole Hassoun
Nanotechnology, Enhancement, and Human Nature
Is nanotechnology-based human enhancement morally permissible? One reason to question such enhancement stems from a concern for preserving our species. It is harder than one might think, however, to explain what could be wrong with altering our own species. One possibility is to turn to the environmental ethics literature. Perhaps some of the arguments for preserving other species can be applied against nanotechnology-based human enhancements that alter human nature. This paper critically examines the case for using two of the strongest arguments in the environmental ethics literature to show that nanotechnology-based human enhancements are impermissible: 1) Our species, like many other naturally occurring species, has aesthetic value. So, nanotechnology-based human enhancements that alter our species should be prohibited. 2) Our species plays valuable ecological roles. Nanotechnology-based human enhancements that alter our species are likely to interfere with our species playing our ecologically valuable roles. So, such enhancements should be prohibited. Neither argument, ultimately, proves conclusive. The paper concludes, however, that considerations underlying both arguments may show us that some nanotechnology-based human enhancements are impermissible.
Nicole Hassoun is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon’s Program on International Relations and the Center for Bioethics and Health Law at the University of Pittsburgh. Hassoun writes primarily in political philosophy and ethics and focuses, in particular, on global economic and environmental justice. She is also interested in methodological issues in philosophy and the other social sciences and does a bit of bioethics.
Sean Hays
Nietzsche and the Philosophical Underpinnings of Human Enhancement
The debate about human enhancement in particular and convergent technologies in general, thus far, has proceeded absent any sort of unifying theoretical or philosophical foundation on the pro-enhancement side of the argument. Vague motions are made in the direction of classical liberalism— and on occasion welfare liberalism—and bastardizations of libertarian political thought. Ethics rears up as a many headed hydra without providing any sort of broadly applicable guidance, let alone a robust philosophical rationale for proceeding with human enhancement (or limiting it for that matter). The inability of proponents in the debate about human enhancement to focus on a logically consistent philosophical framework for thinking about the subject renders speakers frequently inarticulate and occasionally inchoate. It leaves the debate wallowing in the shallow waters of economics, vague ethical propositions, and religious/ideological dogma.
More than a century ago Friedrich Nietzsche generated an entire body of work dedicated to examining the need for—and the potential of—transcending the human condition as he saw it (though he would never include the qualifier). He outlined precise linkages between the man’s intellectual and spiritual advancement and his scientific and technological progress. It could be argued—and I intend to—that the entire project of revaluing all human values was designed not merely to counteract the predominance of “slave morality” but to clear the way for a far more proactive “overcoming”. Technological and scientific progress are insufficient in themselves to facilitate the redemption of mankind in Nietzsche’s opinion. What’s more, their celebration absent a coherent philosophical framework is a disaster for humanity and a symptom of the spiritual degradation of man.
My paper will offer Nietzsche’s philosophy as the first—and perhaps only—logically consistent and broadly applicable philosophical argument in favor of human enhancement. I intend to argue that Nietzsche’s philosophy neatly fills the ethical and philosophical lacunae in the debate about human enhancement and could serve as a useful basis for further debate. I am not suggesting that Nietzsche’s perspective on humanity or the technological, moral, and spiritual overcoming of humanity is correct or should be broadly accepted, merely that all of the ethical and philosophical arguments made in support of enhancement thus far can be subsumed under Nietzsche’s larger program and made more coherent and compelling by his “filling in” of the gaps. More broadly, I am suggesting that the introduction of any consistent philosophical framework for considering the subject would be far more useful than continuing to debate the topic in a “vacuum”, so to speak. I maintain that Transhumanism specifically, and the proponents of human enhancement generally, are a philosophical and ethical bricolage (opponents of enhancement fare better as they can generally find shelter under religious and/or ideological umbrellas of great scope and extensive history). When one half of a debate of such importance is no more than a haphazard conglomerate, neither side is well served; philosophical coherence on the part of proponents of human enhancement would benefit everyone concerned.
Sean Hays is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University and a researcher at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, also at ASU. His principal academic interest is the integration of political theory into Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well as Science and Technology Policy (STP). He has also taught and written on public value mapping including an analysis of the research community at the National Institute of Justice, developing new pedagogies and heuristics for use in virtual worlds, and his dissertation research is on the disutility of linear historical analogies and narratives in STS, STP, and political theory. Most recently he has completed work on an NSF funded national telephone survey measuring public opinion with regard to a variety of human enhancement technologies and their potential socio-political and economic impacts. Sean completed his B.S. in Political Science, Summa cum Laude, in 2004 at ASU and is expected to receive his Ph.D. in 2009.
James Hughes
Technoprogressive Policies to Ensure Enhancement Technologies are Safe and Accessible
The coming years will require replacing the therapy/enhancement categories that guide the innovation and regulation of enabling biotechnologies with a new model of quality of life, capabilities and enablement. The profound social benefits from therapies to slow aging or enhance cognition, for instance, will be limited if federal research priorities and insurance coverage remain restricted to “therapies.” The aggressive use of transgenic animals and in-silico modeling will both accelerate innovation of enabling therapies, and facilitate the more rapid progress of the therapies to human trials. Open source alternatives to traditional clinical trials based on telemedical monitoring and data mining can expand access to experimental enabling drugs and devices. Safety and access will also require vigilant “technocitizenship,” ensuring that regulatory agencies are well financed and politically independent, and that there is universal healthcare access.
James “J.” Hughes Ph.D. serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, as International Secretary of Humanity+, and as lecturer in Health Policy at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut. Dr. Hughes produces the weekly syndicated public affairs talk show Changesurfer Radio and is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University.
Linda MacDonald-Glenn
Not Just a Pretty Face: Legal and Ethical Issues in Regenerative Nanomedicine
Nanomedicine is changing the way we understand healthcare and health services by bringing new drug delivery systems, real time diagnostic testing, in vivo medical imaging, and promises of extended youth and lifespans. Some predict that emerging nano systems will also enhance existing medical technologies for the purpose of healing, but may inadvertently increase the vulnerability to abuse/misuse at the same time. Meanwhile, the nanomedicine industry is expanding without any restrictions, forcing many to wonder if the governments will address these socio-ethical and legal issues. In the United States, initiatives toward a broader policy framework for nanomedicine are still in their infancy; we will explore in our presentation how nano-enabled medical tools and access to them will impact our rights as citizens and as individuals.
Linda McDonald Glenn, JD, LLM (Biomedical Ethics, McGill) is a healthcare ethics educator, attorney-at-law and a consultant. Currently an Assistant Professor at the Alden March Bioethics Institute, Albany Medical Center, she is also a Women’s Bioethics Project Scholar, a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation; she also completed a fellowship at the American Medical Association Institute for Ethics. Her research encompasses the legal, ethical, and social impact of emerging technologies, evolving notions of personhood and informed consent in public health research.
Prior to returning to an academic setting, she consulted and practiced as a trial attorney with an emphasis in patient advocacy, bioethical and biotechnology issues, end of life decision-making, reproductive issues, genetics, parental/biological “nature vs. nurture”, and animal rights issues; she was the lead attorney in several “cutting edge” bioethics legal cases. She has advised governmental leaders and agencies, published numerous articles in professional journals and books.
She has also taught at the Medical College of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical School, University of Vermont College of Nursing and Allied Health Sciences, and Northwestern Law School and has addressed public and professional groups internationally. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Women’s Bioethics Blog. Her extensive experience and passion for the issues facing the legal, nursing, and healthcare professions make her a compelling and thought provoking lecturer.
Jeanann S. Boyce
Co-presenter Dr. Jeanann S. Boyce has extensive experience as an educator and trainer in Education and Computer Systems over the past thirty years. She received her undergraduate degree from Douglass College of Rutgers University and her master’s and doctorate in computer-based information system from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her wide teaching background spans business, computer, and management courses from the undergraduate through doctoral levels. She is currently Professor of Computer Science and Business and coordinator of the Computer Applications program, Montgomery College, Takoma Park Campus, of Maryland. She specializes in teaching artificial intelligence programming and systems and intelligent agents. In addition, she is one of the lead faculty involved on the 11-school Advanced Technology Centers Cyberwatch grant for the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Boyce is recognized as a leader in technical education training. She is an active professional who has written many articles and presents regularly at national and international technical education conferences. She has maintained a currency in technology through continuous consulting. She is certified in a Capability Maturity Management and Configuration Management from the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University and is an evaluator for the American Council on Education. Her current research areas include systems process improvement and the optimization of virtual and classroom learning environments.
Carlos Melendez
Looking Forward to Enhancement: Ethical Thinking Before It’s Too Late
Part of the promise of nanotechnology is the potential for it to modify both human artifacts and human bodies. Envisioned nanotechnology-based human enhancement tends toward technologies substantially different from existing research. Speculative characterizations of technology influence how it develops; on one hand, the promise of better living makes nanohuman enhancement attractive and, on the other hand, perceived harms associated with such enhancements make them risky. In both cases, we are left with inevitable misunderstandings that will result either in irrational, unreflective design and adoption or irrational, unreflective rejection.
We argue that thinking about technology requires the kinds of speculation that often radically diverges from ends and means in view and that so often is in line with ends-reached. Maintaining a full technology ethics that does not reduce thinly to research ethics, business ethics, or political considerations, calls for a speculative approach when thinking about the ethical dimension of new technologies; in this case, human enhancement through nanotechnology. By examining the speculative case of human enhancement through agrifood nanotechnology we hope to show how the normative elements of such developments depend upon such speculation, and how development toward democratic, appropriate technology will be aided.
Carlos Melendez received his B.A. in 2003 from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is now a PhD student at the department of philosophy at Michigan State University. His primary research interests include technological development and technologically mediated experience.
Daniel Moore
Human Enhancement & Military
This talks aims to discuss the near-term nanotechnology research and development aimed for military use, including work done at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies and at other labs around the world. Describing the research and potential military applications, the talk will provide a framework for distinguishing ethically between bulk technology and nanotechnology, offensive and defensive nanotechnology, externally functional nanotechnology (such as enhanced armor) and internal nanotechnology (such as nanomedicine, etc.). I will discuss historically how new military technologies have impacted balances of power and society and how these lessons should or should not be applied to nanotechnology.
Daniel Moore received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2006. There, he studied nanoscale materials and minored in International Affairs. At Georgia Tech, Daniel was a Sam Nunn International Security Fellow, in which he explored national security issues related to nanotechnology. Prior to Georgia Tech, Daniel received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in Physics, Mathematics, and Political Science. He currently works on nanoscale solutions for semiconductor development for IBM. Born in Atlanta, he is a Southerner living in upstate New York. Daniel will be married in July of this year.
Rebecca Roache
Ethics, Speculation, and Values
Some writers claim that ethicists involved in assessing future technologies like nanotechnology and human enhancement devote too much time to debating issues that may or may not arise, at the expense of addressing more urgent, current issues. This practice has been claimed to squander the scarce and valuable resource of ethical concern. I assess this view, and consider some alternatives to ‘speculative ethics’ that have been put forward. I argue that attempting to restrict ethical debate so as to avoid considering unacceptably speculative scenarios would not only leave scientific progress devoid of ethical guidance, but would also rule out some of our most important ethical projects. I conclude that the issue of speculation is a red herring: what is most important is not that ethicists concentrate on current issues or those that are most likely to arise; but that ethicists, scientists, and others focus on maximising what is most valuable.
Rebecca Roache is James Martin Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. She is a philosopher, educated at the universities of Leeds and Cambridge. Recently, she has been working mainly on issues associated with human nature, human values, human enhancement, intuition, and rationality (including, especially, apparent irrationality); but she is also interested in issues in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and metaphysics.
Richard Robeson
Parallax: The Blind Spot Created by the Therapy vs. Enhancement Dichotomy in Sports Ethics
The conventional focus of discussions and analyses of ethics in sports is concerned with rules violations within a given sport — cheating — and the extent to which the integrity of that sport, and by extension that of the individual who is alleged to have cheated, is compromised. The therapy vs. enhancement dichotomy, as vital as it is to honest assessments of patient-subject relationships with healthcare professionals and researchers, has limitations when applied to athletes’ relationships to their sports and to researchers and others who have an interest in their success or failure. In general, we are inclined to regard enhancement as a net positive, as the term itself denotes improvement (Juengst 2008). If a cosmetic or aesthetic surgical procedure is proved to be safe and effective, the enhancement-therapy debate becomes a matter for healthcare policymakers and insurance claims adjusters, but rarely a matter for vigorous debate either inside or outside the immediately affected professions.
The issue of acceptable versus unacceptable enhancement seems almost entirely directed toward athletes. In some instances, enhancements that are deemed acceptable in a particular sport, whether durable (e.g. Tommy John (ulnar collateral ligament) surgery) or temporary (e.g. intravenous saline injections for football players experiencing nausea, muscle cramps and dehydration from high temperature-high humidity playing conditions), are not even regarded as enhancements, and therefore have no associations with cheating or moral turpitude. And while most sports or their governing bodies have sanctions against serological interventions, there is little uniformity across the broad spectrum of sports in what constitutes an enhancement and which enhancements are permissible. For example, although the National Football League doesn’t prohibit IV saline, its ‘”banned substances list” is at once similar and dramatically at variance with banned substances lists in other sports.
Such disparities can be easily understood as the prerogatives of each sport to devise and enforce its own norms. Over time many of these disparities have been highlighted, particularly as the term “doping” has been extended to include technological advances, and “techno-doping” has entered the Olympic sports ethics lexicon, but not that of the Big Four (football, baseball, basketball and hockey). The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was founded in part as a means of applying a single set of standards governing the use of drugs among its signatory sports and institutions. Whether standards are sports-specific or broadly applicable across sports, however, they turn on the moral condemnation of enhancements.
The therapy vs. enhancement dichotomy on the one hand and the acceptable vs. unacceptable enhancement dichotomy on the other have created a parallax — a blind spot, so to speak, at the convergence of perspectives. Within this blind spot are a number of questions pursuant to our ambiguous relationships with athletes and athletics. In being labeled cheaters for using enhancements that go unremarked outside sports, are athletes victims of an ethical double standard? Is there no double standard (Feinstein 2006)? Is a double standard not only acceptable but necessary (Douglas 2007, et al)? Is it reasonable to posit that special ethical strictures are applied to athletes, but that given their status, fame and outsized remuneration, such strictures do not qualify as victimization? When new medical interventions hold the promise of treatments for conditions such as degenerative neuromuscular disorders, or even atrophic processes associated with normal aging (e.g. gene transfer therapy or human growth hormone), one of the first questions to arise is “How do we keep these substances away from athletes?” (Anderson et al 2000). Because at the same time, athletes are often forced to “beta-test” new developments in sports, from equipment to medical interventions (King and Robeson 2007), it is far from obvious what such a question means; but as this paper will argue, there is at least the implication of an adversarial relationship between athletes and society, that we are reluctant to confront. To illuminate these questions is to apply a substantively different line of inquiry into the enhancement vs. therapy dichotomy.
Richard Robeson is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Social Medicine, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, where he specializes in a category of the medical humanities known as Literature and Medicine (Lit-Med). In teaching, his work has the distinction of applying Platonist pedagogical methods to the examination of bioethics issues in a sub-specialty he calls “dramatic arts casuistry.” He first came to the attention of UNC’s Department of Social Medicine in 1984, after his “Analgesia,” an original multi-media theater piece that examined the psychological and emotional detritus of substance abuse, played at Durham’s North Carolina Central University to standing-room-only audiences and critical acclaim. After working as Consultant on a multi-year public bioethics project headquartered in Social Medicine, he was invited to join the faculty in 1989-90, first as Visiting Scholar and shortly thereafter he assumed his current position. His Second-Year Seminar, “Medicine and Theater” to-date stands alone in the development of original, multidisciplinary contributions to Lit-Med pedagogy, including being invited to give Grand Rounds in UNC’s Department of Family Medicine — a rare if not unique honor for an undergraduate medical school class.
Professor Robeson’s research interests are focused on the interaction of narrative and counter-narrative, especially those that are hidden or largely unexplored. As a former high school football and track athlete, and a lifelong sports fan, he believes that there is much about sports, its ethics, narratives and counter-narratives that fit this characterization. His 2007 paper, “Athlete or Guinea Pig — Sports and Enhancement Research,” co-authored with Wake Forest University bioethics scholar Nancy MP King, has been called a radically different line of inquiry into the sports-ethics intersection.
Ron Sandler
Enhancing Justice?
This paper focuses on the follow question: Are human enhancement technologies likely to be justice impairing or justice promoting? We argue that human enhancement technologies may not be inherently just or unjust, but when situated within obtaining social contexts they are likely to exacerbate rather than alleviate social injustices.
Ronald Sandler is an Associate professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion and a researcher in the Nanotechnology and Society Research Group and the Environmental Justice Research Collaborative at Northeastern University. His primary areas of research are environmental ethics, ethics and technology, ethical theory, and Spinoza. Sandler has taught courses on subjects ranging from philosophy of religion to ethics after Darwin and from contemporary moral issues to the history of philosophy. He is an affiliated faculty member of Northeastern University’s Environmental Studies and Jewish Studies programs. He was one of four recipient’s of Northeastern University’s Excellence in Teaching Award for the 2004-2005 academic year.
Tee Toth-Fejel
Nanotechnology and Productive Nanosystems for the U.S. Military: Progress and Implications
A survey of recent and ongoing nanoscale research at government defense contractors shows continual improvements that will lead to high-performance equipment for warfighters. Continued progress in nanoscale structures, devices, machines, and systems will lead to Productive Systems, and this direction is most notable in DARPA’s Tip-Based Nanofabrication program. Defense-oriented research in nanotechnology, while currently aimed at clothing and other external gear, will eventually end up inside the bodies of warfighters, with a wide variety of implications. The ethical evaluation of these implications depends on non-provable assumptions about reality, and the most important relevant issues have been discussed by philosophers for millennia: the nature of the human person and the ethics of war.
Tihamer Toth-Fejel has been interested in nanotechnology since 1978, when heard about it from another grad student, Eric Drexler. At the time, he believed Drexler’s timetable to be overly optimistic, but now he knows better. Toth-Fejel’s 1996 article “LEGOs to the Stars” anticipated much of the modular robotics work that appeared after 2000. He has been involved in two projects for the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, a study of a Self-Replicating System using Kinematic Cellular Automata, and (with Chris Phoenix) a study of Large-Product General-Purpose Design and Manufacturing Using Nanoscale Modules.
Toth-Fejel is currently a senior research engineer at GDAIS, where he investigates quantum dots and other advanced technology applications. He is especially interested in the four main approaches on the Foresight/Battelle Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. He is actively working finding applications for the patterned ALE approach with Zyvex on the DARPA Tip-Based Nanofabrication; his pending patent involves using the DNA origami approach for templating silsesquioxane electronic nanostructures. He is former chair of the Nanomanufacturing Technical Group of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and is on the Advisory Board of The Nanoethics Group.
Wendell Wallach
Public Policy and Human Enhancement: When should new technologies be embraced and when should they be rejected or regulated?
How will humanity navigate the promise and potential perils of technologies that enhance human faculties, improve health, and extend life? Some of the technological possibilities that have been proposed may even invent the human species as we have known it out of existence. However, the social, ethical, and public policy ramifications of adopting specific technologies can not always be known in advance. Furthermore, researchers commonly exaggerate the ease of achieving technological breakthroughs.
The more optimistic extropians and transhumanists emphasize the benefits they believe are and will be derived from each new technology, while their more conservative critics emphasize how each change will be devastating to human identity and human community as we know it. Debate over the desirability of specific technologies often pits individual freedom against the public good.
Over the next few years there is likely to be pressure on the Obama administration to lead a public dialogue regarding the desirability of increasing the cost of Medicare and Medicaid by financing technologies that might extend the life of the dying for days and weeks, the desirability of financing technologies that improve the lives of the disabled while opening the door to the enhancement of faculties for anyone, the desirability of roboticizing the way war is conducted. For each of these issues there is no simple right and wrong. The challenge will be to forge a policy consensus without allowing the discussion to be dominated by a particular ideological perspective. How can this be done? What kinds of leadership, institutions, and frameworks for discussion are most likely to facilitate the emergence of a consensus that can drive the formulation of public policy?
Wendell Wallach is a lecturer and consultant at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. Before coming to Yale, Wendell was a founder and the President of two computer consulting companies, Farpoint Solutions and Omnia Consulting Inc. Among the clients served by Mr. Wallach’s companies were PepsiCo International, United Aircraft, and the State of Connecticut. At Yale University, Wendell chairs the working research group on Technology and Ethics, leads a seminar for bioethics interns, and functions as a senior coordinator for other working groups and projects. He has lectured worldwide, published many articles, and is co-author (with Colin Allen) of Machine Morality: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong (Oxford 2009). He is presently working on a book titled, Cybersoul: Self-Understanding in the Information Age, which explores the ways in which cognitive science and new technologies are altering our understanding of human decision-making and ethics.
Directions
- To the Fetzer Center (conference site)
- Map of WMU campus and conference site
- Map to WMU campus
Lodging
There are several lodging options near Western Michigan University, including the following that we recommend:
Sponsors
The conference is organized by faculty at California Polytechnic State Univ., Dartmouth College, Univ. of Delaware, and Western Michigan University. It is supported by funding from Western Michigan Univ. as well as the US National Science Foundation, under NSF awards # 0620694 and 0621021, as well as Delaware NSF-EPSCoR grant # EPS-0447610.
We also thank the following organizations at Western Michigan University for their generous support: Business Technology and Research Park; Center for the Study of Ethics in Society; College of Arts & Sciences; College of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Office for Vice President of Research; Philosophy Department; and Physics Department. Thank you!