Human 2.0: new minds, new bodies, new identities (9 May, 2007)

After having spent part of today talking about Aimee Mullins and body modifications, this event is awfully appealing. I am in NYC the following week, but it might be just too much of a stretch…
http://h20.media.mit.edu/

Human2.0: new minds, new bodies, new identities

A One-Day Symposium, 5/9/2007 at MIT

Ushering in a New Era for Human Capability

The story of civilization is the story of humans and their tools. Use of
tools has changed the human mind, altered the human body, and
fundamentally reshaped human identity. Now at the dawn of the 21st
century, a new category of tools and machines is poised to radically
change humanity at a velocity well beyond the pace of Darwinian
evolution.

A science is emerging that combines a new understanding of how humans
work to usher in a new generation of machines that mimic or aid human
physical and mental capabilities. Some 150 million of us are over the
age of 80, while 200 million of us suffer from severe cognitive,
emotional, sensory, or physical disabilities. Giving all or even most of
this population a quality of life beyond mere survival is both the
scientific challenge of the epoch and the basis for a coming revolution
over what it means to be human. To unleash this next stage in human
development, our bodies will change, our minds will change, and our
identities will change. The age of Human 2.0 is here.

Hosts

JOHN HOCKENBERRY
award-winning journalist; distinguished Media Lab fellow

HUGH HERR
NEC Career Development Professor, MIT Media Lab

keynote
OLIVER SACKS

special guests
MICHAEL GRAVES
MICHAEL CHOROST
JOHN DONOGHUE
AIMEE MULLINS
DOUGLAS H. SMITH

The program will focus on the Media Lab’s sweeping new research
initiatives for augmenting mental and physical capability to vastly
improve the quality of human life. Presenters will explore how
today’s-and tomorrow’s-advances will seamlessly interact with humans,
giving us a glimpse into a future where all humans will integrate with
technology to heighten our cognition, emotional acuity, perception, and
physical capabilities.

The Media Lab at the Center

In a dramatic and crucially important new initiative, h2.0, the MIT
Media Lab seeks to advance on all fronts to define and focus this
scientific realignment. The Lab will leverage a new understanding of
human cognition, emotion, perception, and movement to produce machines
that better serve humanity.

Positioning itself at the center of a confluence of new science is a
familiar place for the Media Lab. Understanding the adaptive impulse of
humans and harnessing it for the pursuit of a new generation of machines
is an endeavor as world shattering as anything the Media Lab has ever
undertaken. The goal? New Minds, New Bodies, New Identities.
Please Join Us

Technology pushes sporting boundaries (25 March, 2007)

Interview by Australian Associated Press while in Brisbane last week. Here’s the outcome:

Technology pushes sporting boundaries

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411366/1035788

Dozens of leading professional golfers, including Tiger Woods, have had eye surgery to improve their vision. Some believe it gives them “better than perfect” eyesight and makes the tricky business of reading greens far easier.

Hundreds of American major league baseball pitchers have had surgery to implant stronger tendons from elsewhere in their bodies into their elbows. Many of them testify that they can throw the ball harder and faster than they could before the operation.

Now the day may not be far away when athletes have microscopic-sized devices implanted in their brains to help them perform better.

According to Dr Andy Miah, a British bioethicist, the line between using technology to improve sporting equipment and using it to improve the bodies of its practitioners is becoming increasingly blurred.

“Sports are technologically enabled practises,” Miah said.

“We are pushing the limits of the body technologically and creatively – and I think the relationship between those two is quite close.

“People are fascinated with what the body can do in various kinds of performances.”

Miah, who was in Brisbane this week to address a conference organised by the Australian Sports Commission, said functional elective surgery in sport is a more immediate issue than the
long-feared emergence of genetically manipulated athletes.

While the World Anti-Doping Agency concentrates on performance-enhancing drugs and worries about so called “gene-doping”, it has no provision in its code for surgically enhanced athletes.

Woods, who was so short-sighted his doctor said he could barely count fingers held in front of his face, wore contact lenses early in his career.

He had laser surgery on his eyes in late 1999. After the surgery, which gave him vision rated at 20-15, Woods said the hole looked bigger to him.

Whether or not the surgery had anything to do with it, Woods won seven of the next eight PGA tour events he played in. The following year he began the “Tiger Slam” in which he became the first man to hold all four Majors at the same time.

Woods’ surgeon, Dr Mark Whitten, says the eyesight produced by surgically altering the shape of the cornea gives golfers an enhanced three-dimensional view of the shot confronting them. “It
may be better than normal vision,” he says.

Others who have had the surgery include Retief Goosen, Vijay Singh, Scott Hoch, Jesper Parnevik, Lee Westwood and Mike Weir.

Around 10% of major league baseball pitchers in the US have had surgery to strengthen their elbows, which come under enormous strain from repeatedly hurling baseballs at 150 kilometres an hour.

The procedure, called ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction (UCR), is widely know as Tommy John surgery after the pitcher who first had it done in 1974.

According to a report published in USA Today, it involves taking a tendon, usually from the wrist or leg, and grafting it into the elbow in a figure-of-eight pattern through tunnels drilled in the
humerus and ulna bones.

The surgery has saved the careers of hundreds of pitchers, and there is evidence that its success rate is encouraging younger pitchers with only minor elbow injuries to seek the surgery to help their careers.

Some pitchers say they come back better than ever.

“I hit my top speed (in pitch velocity) after the surgery,” said Kerry Wood, who had the procedure five years ago and now pitches for the Chicago Cubs. “I’m throwing harder, consistently.”

Miah believes there is now a new frontier in sporting technology, driven by the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science.

All of these have profound implications for technological and medical developments generally, as well as within sport.

“It seems likely to me that sports will confront the implications of this convergence quite soon.

“We can imagine nanotechnological devices being utilised by athletes to keep them fit … these are molecular-sized devices that could be inserted into the brain to elicit certain kinds of
physiological modifications.”

The technique has already been used to implant molecular-sized devices into the brains of people suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

The implants alter the brain’s electrical output to help cure the  uncontrollable shaking that is the main symptom of the disease.

Technology such as this could have implications in shooting, snooker, archery and other disciplines requiring steady aim.

Miah, who believes genetic manipulation of athletes is not necessarily a bad thing, says the march of technology is throwing up some crucial philosophical questions.

“The development of biotechnology, stem cell research, cloning technology and the like has provoked a kind of moral encounter with what it means to be human and what technology might be doing to alter that.

“If we can develop devices that make it difficult to say these are external to the body, if they’re implantable into the body then it becomes much harder to say that they are artificial.”

International Journal of Internet Research Ethics

Message sent around by Charles Ess announcing a new journal….

Announcing the release of the International Journal of Internet Research Ethics

Call for Papers for the Premier Issue of IJIRE

Description and Scope:
The IJIRE is the first peer-reviewed online journal, dedicated specifically to cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural research on Internet Research Ethics. All disciplinary perspectives, from those in the arts and humanities, to the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences, are reflected in the journal.

With the emergence of Internet use as a research locale and tool throughout the 1990s, researchers from disparate disciplines, ranging from the social sciences to humanities to the sciences, have found a new fertile ground for research opportunities that differ greatly from their traditional biomedical counterparts. As such, “populations,” locales, and spaces that had no corresponding physical environment became a focal point, or site of research activity. Human subjects protections questions then began to arise, acros disciplines and over time: What about privacy? How is informed consent
obtained? What about research on minors? What are “harms” in an online environment? Is this really human subjects work? More broadly, are the ethical obligations of researchers conducting research online somehow different from other forms of research ethics practices?

As Internet Research Ethics has developed as its own field and discipline,
additional questions have emerged: How do diverse methodological approaches
result in distinctive ethical conflicts ­ and, possibly, distinctive ethical
resolutions? How do diverse cultural and legal traditions shape what are
perceived as ethical conflicts and permissible resolutions? How do
researchers collaborating across diverse ethical and legal domains recognize
and resolve ethical issues in ways that recognize and incorporate often
markedly different ethical understandings?

Finally, as “the Internet” continues to transform and diffuse, new research
ethics questions arise ­ e.g., in the areas of blogging, social network
spaces, etc. Such questions are at the heart of IRE scholarship, and such
general areas as anonymity, privacy, ownership, authorial ethics, legal
issues, research ethics principles (justice, beneficence, respect for
persons), and consent are appropriate areas for consideration.

The IJIRE will publish articles of both theoretical and practical nature to
scholars from all disciplines who are pursuing‹or reviewing‹IRE work. Case
studies of online research, theoretical analyses, and practitioner-oriented
scholarship that promote understanding of IRE at ethics and institutional
review boards, for instance, are encouraged. Methodological differences are
embraced.

Publication Schedule:
The IJIRE is published twice annually, March 1, and October 15.
Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis, and are subject to
Editorial and Peer Review.

Subscription:
Free

Editors- in- Chief:
Elizabeth A. Buchanan, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Information Policy Research
School of Information Studies
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
elizabeth.buchanan@gmail.com

Charles M. Ess, Ph.D.
Distinguished Research Professor
Drury University
cmess@drury.edu <mailto:cmess@drury.edu>

Editorial Board:
Andrea Baker, Ohio University, USA
Heidi Campbell, Texas A&M University, USA
Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State University, USA
Jeremy Hunsinger, Virginia Tech, USA
Mark Johns, Luther College, USA
Leslie M. Tkach-Kawasaki, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Tomas Lipinski, JD, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
Ulf-Dietrich Reips, Universität Zürich, Switzerland
Susannah Stern, San Diego State University, USA
Malin Sveningsson, Ph.D., Karlstad University, Sweden

Style Guidelines:
Manuscripts should be submitted to ijire@sois.uwm.edu
<mailto:ijire@sois.uwm.edu> ; articles should be double-spaced, and in the
range of 5000-15,000 words, though announcements of IRE scholarship, case
studies, and book reviews of any length can be submitted for review. Please
ensure that your manuscript is received in good format (proper English
language usage, grammatical structure, spelling, punctuation, and compliance
with APA reference style). The IJIRE follows the American Psychological
Association’s 5th edition. Articles should include an abstract no longer
than 100 words, full names and contact information of all authors, and an
author’s biography of 100 words or less.

Copyright:
In the spirit of open access, IJIRE authors maintain copyright control
of their work. Any subsequent publications related to the IJIRE work
must reference the IJIRE and the original publication date and url.

Web site:
http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/cipr/ijire.html

Mobilities Journal

I’ve just been taking a look at the new Routledge Journal titled ‘Mobilities‘. Currently working on a chapter for The Medicalization of Cyberspace that draws extensively on this notion, I’m struck by how wide the concept might apply. Much of the journal so far focuses on automobiles, which reminds me of some of the work I’ve read in the philosophy of technology literature. Nevertheless, I’m sure this journal will become influential as this term becomes all the more intriguing by the prevasive movement of data. My interest is particularly from the perspective of urban mobility. The work I’ve done at the various Olympic Games has been interested to examine how both screens and hand held technology become an integral part of the development of community. This draws on the work by William J. Mitchell whose ‘City of Bits’ has informed a lot of my ideas in this area, along with Paul Virilio’s various works..