Archive

The Spawn of Frankenstein: Playing God

In Shelley’s vision, Frankenstein was the mod­ern Prometheus. The hip, up to date, learned, vital god who chose to cre­ate human life and paid the dire con­se­quences. To Shelley, gods cre­ate and for humans to do that is bad. Bad for oth­ers but espe­cial­ly bad for one’s creator. 

Grinder Perspective on Gene Editing Tech

I think when you start using this tech­nol­o­gy for enhance­ment, that’s when you start to get into the domain of bio­hack­ing and kind of human aug­men­ta­tion. Well, I believe that this is a very fer­tile ground for peo­ple to explore, and I think that this involves will­ing par­tic­i­pants who are try­ing to find out more about the world around them and try­ing to enhance the human expe­ri­ence. And I think we need to allow that inno­va­tion to take place.

Decoding Workforce Productivity: Nita A. Farahany

Are there any lim­its to the con­nect­ed work­place? Are there any con­cerns about the con­nect­ed work­place? Is there any way in which you would­n’t want either your­self or an employ­ee to be con­nect­ed? Are there any lim­its to the kinds of infor­ma­tion we can gath­er in order to make our work­forces more pro­duc­tive? In order to make our over­all soci­ety more productive?

Our Faces

The French philoso­pher Immanuel Levinas has taught us that it is through our inter­ac­tions with the face of some­body else, it is through encoun­ter­ing the face of anoth­er, that our respon­si­bil­i­ties to some­one else arise. You can­not look at some­body else, tru­ly look at them, and then walk away with­out hav­ing some kind of sense of a rela­tion­ship towards that per­son. But what if the oth­er has no face? What then? Or what if the face of the oth­er is actu­al­ly the face of anoth­er per­son entirely?

Data & Society Databite #41: Ifeoma Ajunwa on Genetic Coercion

The mythol­o­gy of genet­ic coer­cion is thoughts that genet­ic data, espe­cial­ly large-scale genet­ic data­bas­es, have the abil­i­ty to pin­point cer­tain risk of dis­ease. They pro­vide agency to act to pre­vent such dis­ease, and it can be used to cre­ate accu­rate per­son­al­ized treat­ment for dis­ease, and it should also be entrust­ed with the author­i­ty to dic­tate the mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the genome for future generations.