Dear ATCA Colleagues; dear IntentBloggers

[Please note that the views presented by individual contributors are not necessarily representative of the views of ATCA, which is neutral. ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue on global opportunities and threats.]

We are grateful to:

. Prof Nigel M de S Cameron, based in Chicago, Illinois, for "Transhuman Technologies pose Gravest Challenge to Democracy in the 21st Century"

for his response to the ATCA think-piece "The Supra-Universal Consciousness and Better Humans on the one hand and Human Extinction and The Post Human Entity on the other" which includes the submission to ATCA by George Dvorsky from Toronto, Canada, "The Must-know terms for the 21st Century."

Professor Nigel M de S Cameron is Director of the Center on Nanotechnology and Society (nano-and-society.org) at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he is Research Professor of Bioethics, an Associate Dean at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and President of its affiliated Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future. Originally from the UK, he has studied at Cambridge and Edinburgh universities and the Edinburgh Business School. His chief interest lies in the implications of emerging technologies for policy and human values. He has served as bioethics adviser on US diplomatic delegations to the United Nations General Assembly and UNESCO, and was recently an invited US participant in the US Department of State/European Commission Perspectives on the Future of Science and Technology consultation in Varenna, Italy. He is a member of the United States National Commission for UNESCO, and of the advisory boards of the Converging Technologies Bar Association, the Nano Law and Business Journal, the World Healthcare Innovation and Technology Congress, and 2020 Health (UK). He writes:

Dear DK and Colleagues

Re: Transhuman Technologies pose Gravest Challenge to Democracy in the 21st Century

George Dvorsky's mind-bending list of terms and concepts from the world of "transhumanism" will no doubt stimulate the thinking of many distinguished ATCA members, and if his intent is to foster reflection and debate on the application of emerging technologies to human beings and human society I heartily endorse his posting. From where I sit, I see nothing so significant as the rapid development of these technologies, and nothing so troubling as the near-absence of healthy public engagement with their social and ethical implications. Here lies perhaps the gravest challenge to democracy in the 21st century: how we build policy and develop accountability to frame the advance of technologies that promise to be disruptive on a wholly new scale.

To that end, appropriate dialogue with "transhumanists" is one of several desiderata. I was recently one of two "humanists" (if one may be permitted to use the term in that way) invited for such a purpose to the transhumanist conference hosted by Stanford Law School and co-sponsored by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies with which Dr Dvorsky is associated. It is also significant that governments are increasingly recognizing the need to reflect on the societal implications of these technologies and to engage the constructs that various parties are seeking to develop -- from transhumanists to the legatees of Ned Ludd (Dvorsky cites the sad case of the Luddite terrorist known as the "Unabomber," one of the lessons of whose murderous career was that very smart people can have bizarre -- and, in his case, deadly -- views), and also to those of us (which is certainly most of us) somewhere in between.

There are many levels to this conversation. Just last week I participated in a workshop hosted by the US government on the ethical implications of nanotechnology. Last summer I was privileged to participate in the latest round of the Perspectives on the Future of Science and Technology (PFST) series, a dialogue touching on these questions co-sponsored by the US Department of State and the European Commission (meeting on this occasion at Varenna in Italy). Some of the most interesting discussion has in fact been taking place in Europe. Three or four years back the Commission established a High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) to review societal questions raised by "converging technologies," especially in the light of what was (wrongly) perceived to be a tilt in the transhumanist direction on the part of US policy. It may well be that some of the distinguished participants in the HLEG are members of this list, and I leave them to speak for themselves. Suffice to say that they vigorously affirmed the need to develop these technologies in a manner that conforms with European values, and sought to distance themselves from a particular US conference report that was seen as transhumanist in its approach. And it should be noted that there is rising concern, both in government circles and especially within the business and investment community, as to the risk implications of the "sci-fi" branding of emerging technologies (especially nano), not least in Europe where the lessons of the controversy over genetically-modified organisms have been learned hard.

Whether some of the highly optimistic assumptions that run through Dr Dvorsky's transhumanist-friendly lexicon are ultimately justified remains to be seen. Side by side with their technological optimism transhumanists tend to assume an essentially benign view of that human nature which they wish to transcend. One of the "caveats for enhancers" that I shared with the Stanford conference last May reflected my concern that the unconstrained marketplace application of these technologies to give smarter brains and more durable bodies to those who could afford it would lead to a compounding of resources and a dramatic exacerbation of the current bimodal distribution of wealth and power, resulting in a new feudalism. Those who favour the supersession of the human (and use terms like "human racist" for those of us who take the view that human beings are uniquely special!), need to reckon not only with the renaissance vision of humanism, the depth of which many of us believe we have hardly begun to plumb, but with perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of the modern world, the enlightenment assertion of the dignity and rights of the individual -- codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the many instruments that have built upon it (most recently the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights). Some look eagerly to a posthuman future; others may indeed see Ned Ludd as their leader. But those among us who seek the centre-ground hold to the need to integrate these technologies into an increasingly complex but still thoroughly human project, in which enhancing our capacity to be human lies at the core of our moral vision and should continue to drive public policy.

Nigel M de S Cameron

[ENDS]