We face an emerging range of technologies that can be applied to our human natures with the goal of enhancing us. There are nootropic smart drugs and gene editing that influence the development of the brain. The near future promises cybernetic technologies that can be grafted onto our brains and bodies. The challenge for readers of Dialogues on Human Enhancement is to decide how to respond to these and other coming enhancement technologies.As you read these dialogues you w...

Advances in our scientific understanding and technological power in recent decades have dramatically amplified our capacity to intentionally manipulate complex ecological and biological systems. An implication of this is that biological and ecological problems are increasingly understood and approached from an engineering perspective. In environmental contexts, this is exemplified in the pursuits of geoengineering, designer ecosystems, and conservation cloning. In human health contexts, it...

An argument in favor of finding a place for humans (and humanness) in the future digital economy.In the digital economy, accountants, baristas, and cashiers can be automated out of employment; so can surgeons, airline pilots, and cab drivers. Machines will be able to do these jobs more efficiently, accurately, and inexpensively. But, Nicholas Agar warns in this provocative book, these developments could result in a radically disempowered humanity.The digita...

A nuanced discussion of human enhancement that argues for enhancement that does not significantly exceed what is currently possible for human beings.The transformative potential of genetic and cybernetic technologies to enhance human capabilities is most often either rejected on moral and prudential grounds or hailed as the future salvation of humanity. In this book, Nicholas Agar offers a more nuanced view, making a case for moderate human enhancement—improvements...

The rapid developments in technologies -- especially computing and the advent of many 'smart' devices, as well as rapid and perpetual communication via the Internet -- has led to a frequently voiced view which Nicholas Agar describes as 'radical optimism'. Radical optimists claim that accelerating technical progress will soon end poverty, disease, and ignorance, and improve our happiness and well-being. Agar disputes the claim that technological progress will automatically produce...

How to Think about Progress is an interdisciplinary work exploring whether optimistic claims about technology’s potential stand up to humanity’s most difficult challenges. Will technology solve the problems of climate change, pandemics, cancer, loneliness, unhappiness, and even death? The authors show that techno-hype is all too often accepted because of the horizon bias, i.e. the modern propensity to believe that any problem that can be solved with technology will be solved in th...

An argument that achieving millennial life spans or monumental intellects will destroy values that give meaning to human lives.Proposals to make us smarter than the greatest geniuses or to add thousands of years to our life spans seem fit only for the spam folder or trash can. And yet this is what contemporary advocates of radical enhancement offer in all seriousness. They present a variety of technologies and therapies that will expand our capacities far beyond wh...

Ethical Issues in Biotechnology is the first textbook of its kind, written collaboratively by a philosopher and a biologist to provide undergraduate students with a comprehensive, accessible introduction to the ethical and scientific fundamentals of biotechnology. Engaging the ethics and the science side by side, the text addresses pressing questions in agricultural, food, and animal biotechnology; human genetics; gene therapy; human cloning; and stem cell research.A gener...

Decisive biotechnological interventions in the lottery of human life--to enhance our bodies and brains and perhaps irreversibly change our genetic makeup--have been widely rejected as unethical and undesirable and have often met with extreme hostility. But in Enhancing Evolution leading bioethicist John Harris dismantles objections to genetic engineering stem-cell research designer babies and cloning to make a forthright sweeping and rigorous ethical case for using biotechnology to im...

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our...

“This Will Change Everything offers seemingly radical but actually feasible ideas with the potential to change the world.”—Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and SteelEditor John Brockman continues in the same vein as his popular compilations What Are You Optimistic About and What Have You Changed Your Mind About with This Will Change Everything. Brockman asks 150 intellectual superstars “what game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect t...

"Ridley leaps from chromosome to chromosome in a handy summation of our ever increasing understanding of the roles that genes play in disease, behavior, sexual differences, and even intelligence. . . . . He addresses not only the ethical quandaries faced by contemporary scientists but the reductionist danger in equating inheritability with inevitability." — The New YorkerThe genome's been mapped. But what does it mean? Matt Ridley’...