Racism is ugly to confront, and, like most people, I’ve got plenty of personal stories. My grandmother, bless her heart, was a wonderful grandmother, but like many Jewish people of her generation, she was incredibly racist, afraid of black people she didn’t know. This fear caused her anxiety when she got the urge to go to a favorite restaurant. She loved the food, but, as she would derisively say, so did the schvartze (Yiddish slur for a black person). What if she didn’t have to see the black people at all? This possibility is what worries me about our augmented-reality future, which is (mostly) anticipated with optimism. If grandma had lived to see ubiquitous augmented reality, I suspect she’d put it to dehumanizing use, leaving for the restaurant with her goggles on (a less obtrusive artifact than the Coke bottle glasses she actually wore), programming them to make all dark skinned people look like variations of Larry David and Rhea Pearlman. As Brian Wassom — who regularly writes on augmented reality — notes, if apps can “recognize a particular shade of melanin, and replace it with another,” racists could one day “live in their own version of…utopia.”
Grandma might have even been able to get the desired results without making any effort. Perhaps the algorithms running her software would automatically personalize the viewing experience — say, keeping an ongoing record of whom she looked away from, as well as other biological features that register discomfort, such as an accelerated heart rate. Biofeedback could safely cocoon us in an amped up version of the filter bubble.
Disturbing as this scenario is, it barely scratches the surface of what could come to pass. Augmented reality users could do much more than ignore minorities — they could track them. If minorities are dangerous, they’d reason, you want to know where they are at all times. Otherwise, you’re vulnerable. Science-fiction author Tim Maughan has envisioned horrendous possibilities, expressed to me in private correspondence: augmented reality warnings, like a “big floating arrows” that identify people to be avoided from miles away, or a navigation app that steers users away from racially undesirable neighborhoods and establishments.(via Augmented-Reality Racism - Evan Selinger - The Atlantic)
The Eugenic Impulse - The Chronicle of Higher Education (via)
“The ultimate ideal sought,” wrote Harvey Ernest Jordan in 1912, “is a perfect society constituted of perfect individuals.” Jordan, who would later be dean of medicine at the University of Virginia, was speaking to the importance of eugenics in medicine—a subject that might seem tasteless and obsolete today. Yet nearly a century later, in 2008, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the biomedical research institute on Long Island’s north shore, published a book titled Davenport’s Dream, which shows that eugenic visions persist. Charles Davenport, a colleague and friend of Jordan’s, had directed Cold Spring Harbor for the first third of the 20th century, turning it from a sleepy, summertime marine-biology laboratory into a center for genetics research—and the epicenter of American eugenics.
Davenport’s Dream is a facsimile of Davenport’s major work, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), prefaced by nearly 200 pages of commentary by scientists, historians, and legal experts celebrating Davenport and expanding on questions of genetics and eugenics in biomedicine. In the volume, the genome guru Maynard V. Olson writes that dbSNP, the database of small genetic variations, makes possible the fulfillment of Davenport’s dream. “Here,” he writes, “is the raw material for a real science of human genetic perfection.”
At io9, George Dvorsky has a look at whether we could enter a post-animal-experimentation world.
As a biologist, I’m all-too-aware of the ethical muck surrounding animal experimentation. No one, literally no scientist I know, enjoys having to resort to harming mice or rabbits or any other animal in the name of research. But many of us are charged with the task of improving the health and well-being of humans. Simply put, for many biological models, we haven’t had a good alternative to using animals (despite what many opposition groups claim).
The rule of thumb has always been to use animal research only where absolutely necessary, and then to do it humanely and minimally. New technologies may finally be providing honest, quality alternatives to using animals in experimentation.
We aren’t talking about simple cells in a petri dish. Those are no closer to an animal system than a potted plant is to a forest. These new technologies include synthetic tissues and organs, engineered complex cell culture systems, non-invasive and safe human testing, and even computer models.
Of course, we have decades of experience and regulations about how animal models are used to better medicine, and before we start designing drugs using a computer we have to test the bejeezus out of these new technologies. Most aren’t quite ready to be truly useful in medicine as it applies to a full human body, and none of them are perfect. But the fact is that animal research isn’t perfect either, and the results don’t translate as well as we would hope. To put it another way, the animal models may have as many errors and shortcomings as some of the new technologies.
(One of the jokes I tell my biology students is that if you were a mouse, getting cancer would be no big deal … we’ve cured it lots of times. Last time I checked, that wasn’t the case for humans.)
I’ve never been anti-animal testing in the purest sense, because we have gained many insights from it that we wouldn’t have otherwise. And we will continue to, for the near future. But I have always looked forward to a time when animal experiments won’t be completely necessary, and it looks like we are getting closer to that day. I recommend reading the linked article, to get informed about where we are headed, and what remains to be done.
Some of the most successful trials in the history of medicine began with mice, some of them didn’t produce an end product not because of errors in translation from model organisms to human biological systems, but because of problems associated with modern science (aka funding, effectiveness, etc…) As Joe states, there’s some pretty interesting stuff being done at the moment but it won’t replace animals any time soon. However I’m glad that other people are thinking and pushing for animal-free experimentation.
Now stop burning down labs.
Much less debatable is the conclusion that the process is extraordinarily expensive, lengthy and in desperate need of improvement. Doing so, however, is a monumental task. Modern drug development requires unprecedented partnering these days between academia, which has the intellectual expertise and focus to imagine new therapeutic concoctions, and industry, which has the financial wherewithal and ability to help turn those ideas into beneficial health products. While supporters can point to success stories resulting from contemporary academic-industry collaborations, critics can equally cite negative consequences, conflicts of interest, for example, that have benefitted the few at the expense of many.”
Imagine a being capable of processing, remembering and sharing information — a being with potentialities proper to it and inhabiting a world of its own. Given this brief description, most of us will think of a human person, some will associate it with an animal, and virtually no one’s imagination will conjure up a plant.
…
The research findings of the team at the Blaustein Institute form yet another building block in the growing fields of plant intelligence studies and neurobotany that, at the very least, ought to prompt us to rethink our relation to plants. Is it morally permissible to submit to total instrumentalization living beings that, though they do not have a central nervous system, are capable of basic learning and communication? Should their swift response to stress leave us coldly indifferent, while animal suffering provokes intense feelings of pity and compassion?
”If peas can talk, should we eat them? | Opinionator
Don’t eat anything unless it’s already dead (of natural causes), live off of shadows and filter feed if possible. I’m joking.
Most importantly, Mike Daisey wasn’t wrong that it is possible for Chinese authorities and Apple to substantially improve labor conditions — without making their products any more expensive or less competitive — and that American consumers can help make this happen. But he was wrong that embellishing his story would help, that bad behavior in service of a good cause ever does.”
Max Fisher, The Atlantic. The Tragedy of Mike Daisey’s Lies About China.
(via futurejournalismproject)
I wrote this piece on my MacBook Air and I proofread it on my iPad, devices which are dear to me and which power much of my work and recreation. Like many happy Apple customers, though, I’ve been forced to consider the very unhappy conditions under which these gadgets – and others like them – are produced. How should those of us who love and depend upon our electronics feel about the suffering of the factory workers who are laboring and even dying for us?
While information about worker suicides and unsafe conditions has been making the rounds for some time, the latest and loudest critique began with a recent stirring piece in the New York Times on the operations of Foxconn, the manufacturing partner that operates electronics factories in China. Foxconn seemingly holds the health and safety of workers in outright contempt:
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.
In addition, there have been numerous reports of injuries arising from the use of harmful chemicals and from explosions in some of the factories. And, of course, there have been several instances of worker suicides, which have rightfully drawn a great deal of attention.
On the one hand, these terrible conditions gnaw at us because we know it’s our demand for high-tech products at low prices that drives corporations to pay workers less and spend less on safety, not to mention move their manufacturing into countries with little to no regulation. On the other hand, workers freely choose to take these jobs; in fact, Foxconn regularly turns away fully informed job seekers since the pay and the conditions they offer are better than many other options available, particularly for young rural workers. Without the demand and thus the factories, many of the people who are being exploited would be struggling to feed their families and would end up exploited in some other way. Indeed, this is the position on sweatshops taken by Nicholas Kristof and by Paul Krugman.
With those two poles of the debate in mind, I still feel comfortable asserting that the exploitation of poor workers is a moral wrong. We ought to prevent others from exploiting disadvantaged people. In order to end the exploitation, neither market forces nor an organized boycott will suffice. We need government regulation requiring sufficient wages and safe conditions. Regulation will almost surely lead to higher prices, but it’s time we priced human dignity into the feature checklists of our immorally inexpensive electronics.
Go read the full piece by Dr. Ari Kohen. It’s definitely worth a few minutes of your time. h/t: manicchill
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin G. Miller have a (perhaps controversial) new paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics [ungated] on morality, killing, and vital organ transplantation; here’s the abstract:
What makes an act of killing morally wrong is not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities. This account implies that it is not even pro tanto morally wrong to kill patients who are universally and irreversibly disabled, because they have no abilities to lose. Applied to vital organ transplantation, this account undermines the dead donor rule and shows how current practices are compatible with morality.
I suspect that a fair number of people will have complaints with the argument put forward by Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller, especially insofar as they accept that their view on killing and organ transplantation might be regarded as representing a “ radical departure from traditional morality and medical ethics.” But I’ll be particularly curious about how they will complain since the argument — at least on my reading — is pretty carefully constructed.
