Michael Bess

Icarus 2.0: A Historian's Perspective on Human Biological Enhancement

Some of the most important watersheds in human history have been associated with new applications of technology in everyday life: the shift from stone to metal tools, the transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture, the substitution of steam power for human and animal energy. Today we are in the early stages of an epochal shift that will prove as momentous as those other great transformations. This time around, however, the new techniques and technologies are not being applied to reinventing our tools, our methods of food production, our means of manufacturing. Rather, it is we ourselves who are being refashioned. We are applying our ingenuity to the challenge of redesigning our own physical and mental capabilities. Technologies of human enhancement are developing, ever more rapidly, along three major fronts: pharmaceuticals, prosthetics/informatics, and genetics.1 Though advances in each of these three domains are generally distinct from those in the other two, their collective impact on human bodies and minds has already begun to manifest itself, raising profound questions about what it means to be human. Over the coming decades,

Eight Kinds of Critters: A Moral Taxonomy for the Twenty-Second Century

Over the coming century, the accelerating advance of bioenhancement technologies, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) may significantly broaden the qualitative range of sentient and intelligent beings. This article proposes a taxonomy of such beings, ranging from modified animals to bioenhanced humans to advanced forms of robots and AI. It divides these diverse beings into three moral and legal categories-animals, persons, and presumed persons-describing the moral attributes and legal rights of each category. In so doing, the article sets forth a framework for extending the concept of personhood well beyond its current boundaries, assigning moral standing to a variety of biological and nonbiological beings. The author concludes that six of the eight subgroups of such beings deserve to be treated as persons or as if they were persons, with full consideration for their presumed interests, rights, obligations, and capabilities for ethically significant agency and patiency.

Leo Szilard: scientist, activist, visionary

A pioneer in both the development of nuclear weapons and the movement against them, Leo Szilard put forth his own life as a model for the radically new assumptions and values demanded by the nuclear age.