biotechnology

All posts tagged biotechnology

Hello Everyone.

Here is my prerecorded talk for the NC State R.L. Rabb Symposium on Embedding AI in Society.

There are captions in the video already, but I’ve also gone ahead and C/P’d the SRT text here, as well.
[2024 Note: Something in GDrive video hosting has broken the captions, but I’ve contacted them and hopefully they’ll be fixed soon.]

There were also two things I meant to mention, but failed to in the video:

1) The history of facial recognition and carceral surveillance being used against Black and Brown communities ties into work from Lundy Braun, Melissa N Stein, Seiberth et al., and myself on the medicalization and datafication of Black bodies without their consent, down through history. (Cf. Me, here: Fitting the description: historical and sociotechnical elements of facial recognition and anti-black surveillance”.)

2) Not only does GPT-3 fail to write about humanities-oriented topics with respect, it still can’t write about ISLAM AT ALL without writing in connotations of violence and hatred.

Also I somehow forgot to describe the slide with my email address and this website? What the hell Damien.

Anyway.

I’ve embedded the content of the resource slides in the transcript, but those are by no means all of the resources on this, just the most pertinent.

All of that begins below the cut.

 Black man with a mohawk and glasses, wearing a black button up shirt, a red paisley tie, a light grey check suit jacket, and black jeans, stands in front of two tall bookshelves full of books, one thin & red, one of wide untreated pine, and a large monitor with a printer and papers on the stand beneath it.

[First conference of the year; figured i might as well get gussied up.]

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Much of my research deals with the ways in which bodies are disciplined and how they go about resisting that discipline. In this piece, adapted from one of the answers to my PhD preliminary exams written and defended two months ago, I “name the disciplinary strategies that are used to control bodies and discuss the ways that bodies resist those strategies.” Additionally, I address how strategies of embodied control and resistance have changed over time, and how identifying and existing as a cyborg and/or an artificial intelligence can be understood as a strategy of control, resistance, or both.

In Jan Golinski’s Making Natural Knowledge, he spends some time discussing the different understandings of the word “discipline” and the role their transformations have played in the definition and transmission of knowledge as both artifacts and culture. In particular, he uses the space in section three of chapter two to discuss the role Foucault has played in historical understandings of knowledge, categorization, and disciplinarity. Using Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish, we can draw an explicit connection between the various meanings “discipline” and ways that bodies are individually, culturally, and socially conditioned to fit particular modes of behavior, and the specific ways marginalized peoples are disciplined, relating to their various embodiments.

This will demonstrate how modes of observation and surveillance lead to certain types of embodiments being deemed “illegal” or otherwise unacceptable and thus further believed to be in need of methodologies of entrainment, correction, or reform in the form of psychological and physical torture, carceral punishment, and other means of institutionalization.

Locust, “Master and Servant (Depeche Mode Cover)”

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Previously, I told you about The Human Futures and Intelligent Machines Summit at Virginia Tech, and now that it’s over, I wanted to go ahead and put the full rundown of the events all in one place.

The goals for this summit were to start looking at the ways in which issues of algorithms, intelligent machine systems, human biotech, religion, surveillance, and more will intersect and affect us in the social, academic, political spheres. The big challenge in all of this was seen as getting better at dealing with this in the university and public policy sectors, in America, rather than the seeming worse we’ve gotten, so far.

Here’s the schedule. Full notes, below the cut.

Friday, June 8, 2018

  • Josh Brown on “the distinction between passive and active AI.”
  • Daylan Dufelmeier on “the potential ramifications of using advanced computing in the criminal justice arena…”
  • Mario Khreiche on the effects of automation, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the Microlabor market.
  • Aaron Nicholson on how technological systems are used to support human social outcomes, specifically through the lens of policing  in the city of Atlanta
  • Ralph Hall on “the challenges society will face if current employment and income trends persist into the future.”
  • Jacob Thebault-Spieker on “how pro-urban and pro-wealth biases manifest in online systems, and  how this likely influences the ‘education’ of AI systems.”
  • Hani Awni on the sociopolitical of excluding ‘relational’ knowledge from AI systems.

Saturday, June 9, 2018

  • Chelsea Frazier on rethinking our understandings of race, biocentrism, and intelligence in relation to planetary sustainability and in the face of increasingly rapid technological advancement.
  • Ras Michael Brown on using the religions technologies of West Africa and the West African Diaspora to reframe how we think about “hybrid humanity.”
  • Damien Williams on how best to use interdisciplinary frameworks in the creation of machine intelligence and human biotechnological interventions.
  • Sara Mattingly-Jordan on the implications of the current global landscape in AI ethics regulation.
  • Kent Myers on several ways in which the intelligence community is engaging with human aspects of AI, from surveillance to sentiment analysis.
  • Emma Stamm on the idea that datafication of the self and what about us might be uncomputable.
  • Joshua Earle on “Morphological Freedom.”

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This weekend, Virginia Tech’s Center for the Humanities is hosting The Human Futures and Intelligent Machines Summit, and there is a link for the video cast of the events. You’ll need to Download and install Zoom, but it should be pretty straightforward, other than that.

You’ll find the full Schedule, below the cut.

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So, many of you may remember that back in June of 2016, I was invited to the Brocher Institute in Hermance, Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva, to take part in the Frankenstein’s Shadow Symposium sponsored by Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination as part of their Frankenstein Bicentennial project.

While there, I and a great many other thinkers in art, literature, history, biomedical ethics, philosophy, and STS got together to discuss the history and impact of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Since that experience, the ASU team compiled and released a book project: A version of Mary Shelley’s seminal work that is filled with annotations and essays, and billed as being “For Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds.”

[Image of the cover of the 2017 edited, annotated edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds.”]

Well, a few months ago, I was approached by the organizers and asked to contribute to a larger online interactive version of the book—to provide an annotation on some aspect of the book I deemed crucial and important to understand. As of now, there is a full functional live beta version of the website, and you can see my contribution and the contributions of many others, there.

From the About Page:

Frankenbook is a collective reading and collaborative annotation experience of the original 1818 text of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The project launched in January 2018, as part of Arizona State University’s celebration of the novel’s 200th anniversary. Even two centuries later, Shelley’s modern myth continues to shape the way people imagine science, technology, and their moral consequences. Frankenbook gives readers the opportunity to trace the scientific, technological, political, and ethical dimensions of the novel, and to learn more about its historical context and enduring legacy.

To learn more about Arizona State University’s celebration of Frankenstein’s bicentennial, visit frankenstein.asu.edu.

You’ll need to have JavaScript enabled and ad-blocks disabled to see the annotations, but it works quite well. Moving forward, there will be even more features added, including a series of videos. Frankenbook.org will be the place to watch for all updates and changes.

I am deeply honoured to have been asked to be a part of this amazing project, over the past two years, and I am so very happy that I get to share it with all of you, now. I really hope you enjoy it.

Until Next Time.

The Nature

Ted Hand recently linked me to this piece by Steven Pinker, in which Pinker claims that, in contemporary society, the only job of Bioethics—and by, following his argument to its conclusion, technological ethics, as a whole—is to “get out of the way” of progress. You can read the whole exchange between Ted, myself, and others by clicking through that link, if you want, and the Journal Nature also has a pretty good breakdown of some of the arguments against Pinker, if you want to check them out, but I’m going to take some time to break it all down and expound upon it, here.

Because the fact of the matter is we have to find some third path between the likes of Pinker saying “No limits! WOO!” and Hawking saying “Never do anything! BOOOO!”—a Middle Way of Augmented Personhood, if you will. As Deb Chachra said, “It doesn’t have to be a dichotomy.”

But the problem is that, while I want to blend the best and curtail the worst of both both impulses, I have all this vitriol, here. Like, sure, Dr Pinker, it’s not like humans ever met a problem we couldn’t immediately handle, right? We’ll just sort it all out when we get there! We’ve got this global warming thing completely in hand and we know exactly how to regard the status of the now-enhanced humans we previously considered “disabled,” and how to respect the alterity of autistic/neuroatypical minds! Or even just differently-pigmented humans! Yeah, no, that’s all perfectly sorted, and we did it all in situ!

So no need to worry about what it’ll be like as we further immediate and integrate biotechnological advances! SCIENCE’LL FIX THAT FOR US WHEN IT HAPPENS! Why bother figuring out how to get a wider society to think about what “enhancement” means to them, BEFORE they begin to normalize upgrading to the point that other modes of existence are processed out, entirely? Those phenomenological models can’t have anything of VALUE to teach us, otherwise SCIENCE would’ve figured it all out and SHOWN it to us, by now!

Science would’ve told us what benefit blindness may be. Science would’ve TOLD us if we could learn new ways of thinking and understanding by thinking about a thing BEFORE it comes to be! After all, this isn’t some set of biased and human-created Institutions and Modalities, here, folks! It’s SCIENCE!

…And then I flip 37 tables. In a row.

The Lessons
“…Johns Hopkins, syphilis, and Guatemala. Everyone *believes* they are doing right.” —Deb Chachra

As previously noted in “Object Lessons in Freedom,” there is no one in the history of the world who has undertaken a path for anything other than reasons they value. We can get into ideas of meta-valuation and second-order desires, later, but for the sake of having a short hand, right now: Your motivations motivate you, and whatever you do, you do because you are motivated to do it. You believe that you’re either doing the right thing, or the wrong thing for the right reasons, which is ultimately the same thing. This process has not exactly always brought us to the best of outcomes.

From Tuskegee, to Thalidomide (also here) to dozens of other cases, there have always been instances where people who think they know what’s in the public’s best interest loudly lobby (or secretly conspire) to be allowed to do whatever they want, without oversight or restriction. In a sense, the abuse of persons in the name of “progress” is synonymous with the history of the human species, and so a case might be made that we wouldn’t be where and what we are, right now, if we didn’t occasionally (often) disregard ethics and just do what “needed doing.” But let’s put that another way:

We wouldn’t be where and what we are, if we didn’t occasionally (often) disregard ethics and just do what “needed doing.”

As species, we are more often shortsighted than not, and much ink has been spilled, and many more pixels have been formed in the effort to interrogate that fact. We tend to think about a very small group of people connected to ourselves, and we focus our efforts how to make sure that we and they survive. And so competition becomes selected for, in the face of finite resources, and is tied up with a pleasurable sense of “Having More Than.” But this is just a descriptor of what is, not of the way things “have to be.” We’ve seen where we get when we work together, and we’ve seen where we get when we compete, but the evolutionarily- and sociologically-ingrained belief that we can and will “win” keeps us doing he later over the former, even though this competition is clearly fucking us all into the ground.

…And then having the descendants of whatever survives digging up that ground millions of years later in search of the kinds of resources that can only be renewed one way: by time and pressure crushing us all to paste.

The Community: Head and Heart

Keeping in mind the work we do, here, I think it can be taken as read that I’m not one for a policy of “gently-gently, slowly-slowly,” when it comes to technological advances, but when basic forethought is equated with Luddism—that is, when we’re told that “PROGRESS Is The Only Way!”™—when long-term implications and unintended consequences are no bother ‘t’all, Because Science, and when people place the fonts of this dreck as the public faces of the intersections of Philosophy and Science? Well then, to put it politely, we are All Fucked.

If we had Transmetropolitan-esque Farsight Reservations, then I would 100% support the going to there and doing of that, but do you know what it takes to get to Farsight? It takes planning and (funnily enough) FORESIGHT. We have to do the work of thinking through the problems, implications, dangers, and literal existential risks of what it is we’re trying to make.

And then we have to take all of what we’ve thought through, and decide to figure out a way to do it all anyway. What I’m saying is that some of this shit can’t be Whoopsed through—we won’t survive it to learn a post hoc lesson. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying. This is about saying, “Yeah, let’s DO this, but let’s have thought about it, first.” And to achieve that, we’ll need to be thinking faster and more thoroughly. Many of us have been trying to have this conversation—the basic framework and complete implications of all of this—for over a decade now; the wider conversation’s just now catching up.

But it seems that Steven Pinker wants to drive forward without ever actually learning the principles of driving (though some do propose that we could learn the controls as we go), and Stephen Hawking never wants us to get in the car at all. Neither of these is particularly sustainable, in the long term. Our desires to see a greater field of work done, and for biomedical advancements to be made, for the sake of increasing all of our options, and to the benefit of the long-term health of our species, and the unfucking of our relationship with the planet, all of these possibilities make many of us understandably impatient, and in some cases, near-desperately anxious to get underway. But that doesn’t mean that we have to throw ethical considerations out the window.

Starting from either place of “YES ALWAYS DO ALL THE SCIENCE” or “NO NEVER DO THESE SCIENCES” doesn’t get us to the point of understanding why we’re doing the science we’re doing, and what we hope to achieve by it (“increased knowledge” an acceptable answer, but be prepared to show your work), and what we’ll do if we accidentally start Eugenics-ing all up in this piece, again. Tech and Biotech ethics isn’t about stopping us from exploring. It’s about asking why we want to explore at all, and coming to terms with the real and often unintended consequences that exploration might have on our lives and future generations.

This is a Propellerheads and Shirley Bassey Reference

In an ideal timeline, we’ll have already done all of this thinking in advance (again: what do you think this project is?), but even if not, then we can at least stay a few steps ahead of the tumult.

I feel like I spend a lot of time repeating myself, these days, but if it means we’re mindful and aware of our works, before and as we undertake them, rather than flailing-ly reacting to our aftereffects, then it’s ultimately pretty worth it. We can place ourselves into the kind of mindset that seeks to be constantly considering the possibilities inherent in each new instance.

We don’t engage in ethics to prevent us from acting. We do ethics in order to make certain that, when we do act, it’s because we understand what it means to act and we still want to. Not just driving blindly forward because we literally cannot conceive of any other way.

I’m working on having conversations with some developmental and family psychologists about the kinds of things you would expect I’d be talking to them–and then telling you–about. I’m also working with several other people to organize three or four different A/V conversations about various shows and films that’ve come out, this year.

Obviously, then, we’re in the middle of some detailed discussions which might take a little while, so until they take a firmer shape, let’s talk about something else near and dear to our hearts: Cybernetic Augmentations!

It’s actually been a pretty great few months for our advancements in wearable prostheses/augmentations, so I’m just going to list a few of my favourites and most recent ones, below:


 

  • ‘Ocumetics Bionic Lens Could Give You Vision 3x Better than 20/20’

    ‘”There’s a lot of excitement about the Bionic Lens from very experienced surgeons who perhaps had some cynicism about this because they’ve seen things not work in the past. They think that this might actually work and they’re eager enough that they all wish to be on the medical advisory board to help him on his journey,” DeLuise says.
    ‘”I think this device is going to bring us closer to the holy grail of excellent vision at all ranges — distant, intermediate and near.”
    ‘Pending clinical trials on animals and then blind human eyes, the Bionic Lens could be available in Canada and elsewhere in about two years, depending on regulatory processes in various countries, Webb says.’

 

  • 3D-Printed Titanium Jaw Lets Turtle Eat Again
    ‘Once the bionic turtle has made a full recovery, the team plans to release it back into the ocean to live happily once again. It’s hoped that this pioneering surgery will be able to help more injured sea turtles in the future and improve their chances of survival.’

 

  • Amputees Control Bionic Legs with Their Thoughts” (Video At Link)
    ‘As soon as I put my foot on, it took me about 10 minutes to get control of it. I could stand up and just walk away. Come back, sit down, use my muscles to move my foot in the position I wanted to use it. It was, like you couldn’t believe the feeling when you were moving your ankle. It was really strange. I couldn’t explain it. It was like, I was moving it with my muscles, there was nobody else doing it, the foot was not doing it, I was doing it, so it was really strange and overwhelming,” Olafsson remembered.’

 

What we’re looking at is a lot of potentially wonderful biomechanical interventions coming to fruition, right now and in the next few months and years. On top of that, for the past couple of weeks, NPR’s been a providing a great deal of coverage on autonomous created/generated machine intelligences and their applications for daily life. As we can see in this piece about Ellie, the interactive therapeutic system used to diagnose PTS, and depression, the level of sophistication in machine intelligences–not to mention the pace of their development–is increasing, and so, therefore, is the pressure to accept these developments as “normal.”

Now you well know (and others won’t hesitate to tell you) that the existences of these therapies, prostheses, augmentations, and systems are not unequivocal benefits, applicable to any and all experiential modes, but as the bullet list above shows, if we keep our minds about us, then we can apply them with discernment. And those applications can damn sure do many of us a lot of good.

[EDIT: While I was working on this post, The Washington Post published this piece:

Bolding mine and more information and a video at the link. So there’s that.]