Good and evil on the new frontier
by Kit Wilson, The Critic:
Our current ethical guidelines are hopelessly inadequate for a new era of unimaginable technological change.
We’re entering an era of almost unfathomable, radical technological change. Elon Musk is getting monkeys to play Pong with just their brains. China is experimenting with genetically-enhanced “super-soldiers”. Neuroscientists in the States are developing “injectable nano-sensors” that can read our thoughts. Even the White House recently published a report discussing the “singularity” — the coming moment in time when “machines quickly race far ahead of humans in intelligence”.
Unless — as seems unlikely — all these technological developments end up coming to nothing, we’re quickly going to be confronted with a deluge of ethical predicaments. The twentieth century had the atomic bomb, the pill, and the internet. We’re about to get artificial intelligence, deepfakes, gene-editing, nanotechnology, bioweapons, brain-computer interfaces, and autonomous lethal drones — all at once.
Yet if I asked you who, exactly, is setting the moral rules for these new technologies — who, in the world, is deciding, say, the appropriate uses for brain-computer interfaces — would you be able to answer? Take, for example, “xenobots” — tiny, artificially-made cellular organisms, dubbed, by the scientists who created them last year, the “world’s first biological robots”. These critters were produced by cobbling together small clumps of skin and heart cells taken from frogs. Heart cells naturally expand and contract, while skin cells remain static. Depending on where, then, the scientists placed the heart cells, the xenobot ended up paddling itself along on one of a handful of “pre-programmed” paths: in just the same way that clipping a motor to different parts of a dinghy makes it surge forward in a straight line or spin round in circles.
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