Friday, as we all rightly welcomed Dr. Frist's visit into the land of logical decision making, I tuned into the daily installment of
To the Point.
From robots that will enter our bloodstream to devour cancer cells and near-infrared wavelengths that will heal a soldier's wound right on the battlefield to a pill that could improve a child's SAT score by 200 points, we are on the verge of some radical medical and scientific transformations. What it means to be human is about to evolve in ways unimaginable to us today.
As progressives, who are we to stand in the way of progress? But I feel that if the children born two generations from now are asking their parents for the next coolest bio-enhancement rather than the next coolest pair of shoes, then I am very lucky to have been born into a world that is still innocent of such complications.
Read on, vote.
This is a topic that brings to the surface a host of ethics issues that are on the horizon of our platformation as progressives of the 21st century. The beneficial uses of such advances are obvious, and almost utopian in their reach. But as history shows, an unexamined utopian vision can turn out to have been a forbidden fruit. There is the danger of a natural vs.
transhuman class warfare. There is the unthinkable future of nanotechnological warfare and nanobio-terrorism.
DARPA is currently researching human assisted neural devices, human exoskeletons, and roboticly enhanced sensory organs. GRIN (genetics, robotics, I.T., and nanotech) techonologies promise to create a paradigm shift in our way of living and in our conception of what it is to be human.
If you are in favor of a go-slow approach to GRIN technology, then you have to sort out some things that I've been grappling with. That is: how can a liberal declare that she would like to impose this go-slow morality onto our society through legislation? Is it hypocritical when compared to denouncing the Christian conservatives desire to legislate morality? Is it practical? Where do we draw the line, and why there?
I think that the line is obvious, but there are many who are woking on things right now that I think may cross it if carried beyond proof-of-principle demonstrations. The line is the point at which a new weapon is unleashed on our civilization, that will make the potential mis-use of nuclear technology seem quaint. Quaint, not in the fact that nano-genetic tampering or an army of transhumans could wipe us all out and a nuclear attack can't; they both have that potential. But quaint in that the GRIN technologies would at the same time, provide new weapons of mass destruction, and provide a new level of cultural elitism that could enliven feelings of animosity and hatred within society.
Sometimes I think that we have to be content to know that we could climb that mountain if we wanted to, and that it might make us feel satisfied in our awesome abilities, but that staying behind to appreciate the finer qualities of a more natural life is more noble a cause. When we all devote ourselves to making our immediate worlds a little better, the mountain will always be there. If we devote ourselves to climbing the mountain unprepared, we may or may not pay a stiff price to mother nature, while our natural home will certainly lanquish in neglect.
We democrats have adopted enviromental conservation as our cause in the face of its abandonment by the republicans. As these technologies come on board, first for military use, and later as highly marketable consumer products, I am fairly certain that the republican party will step obligingly aside, rather than confront the ethical issues in a way that might put a check on the markets. I think it is up to us to be proactively on the correct side of this issue and I think that it is not too early to start having a serious conversation about it.
The far right conservatives that are against embryonic stem-cell research are working in the arena of deeply held beliefs that we don't agree with on the basis of scientific facts. But they claim the moral highground on the issue and relate it rhetorically to other issues like human reproductive cloning It won't not be long until they take the moral highground on transhuman technologies too. But we should not be so quick to disagree, and we should examine each technology carefully and understand the worst case scenarios before we disparagingly label such pro-tech-tionist policies as "conservative".