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Anders Sandberg’s Posts

Brain Boosting and Cheating in Exams: Four Responses

A report by the Academy of Medical Sciences looking at different aspects of drug use and mental health has identified a growing trend for off-label use of drugs intended for the treatment of diseases including narcolepsy, ADHD and Alzheimer’s. The use of such drugs by a healthy individual can improve memory, alertness and concentration. While the report does not condemn the practice, it raises a number of potential concerns over safety, and fairness. Professor Les Iversen, report co-author, highlighted concerns that the use of enhancement in exams would unfairly advantage wealthier students, and suggested that the use of such drugs could be considered cheating. The report recommends that legislation is prepared to tackle the misuse of such drugs, including the potential for urine testing in schools and universities.

Below are responses from Julian Savulescu, Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg and Mark Sheehan on the effects of cognitive enhancing drugs, and the issue of cheating

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Humane Evolution

Professor John Harris wonders Who’s afraid
of a synthetic human? in the Times. He argues we should support
the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill because it will help us develop
effective therapies and enhance ourselves. Science is about bettering our lot,
after all. In particular, he says, synthetic biology may help us avoid going
extinct due to our vulnerabilities and instead enable us to choose (or become)
our successors as a species.

Many people become confused by the
possibility of a posthuman future. The traditional view of the future is a
stark one: either humanity extinct, or humans roughly as they are today. The
posthuman options would be that we either change ourselves so radically that
the resulting species is so  fundamentally different from humanity that we
would regard it as something entirely new, or that we create some kind of independent
beings that continue our culture even as traditional humanity retires from the
forefront (hopefully as proud parents of the new beings). The range of possible
options within these scenarios is endless, inviting equally endless and loud
speculation. That tends to distract from the key message of Harris’ essay: we
are leaving the realm of natural evolution and entering what he calls a realm
of enhancement evolution.

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A Pipeline to Truth? Fighting Absenteeism with Voice Analysis

The Daily Mail warns that bosses want to
use over-the-phone lie detectors to catch out workers pulling a sickie. The issue is the new generation of voice
analysis software that listens in when someone calls in sick, and prompts the person
talking the call on whether the person is suspiciously stressed. Yet another step towards
1984, a great way of
saving money and improving the truthfulness of people, or a double deceit?

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Looking for Biopolitical Trouble

Researchers at Cornell university have
developed a genetically modified human embryo expressing a green fluorescent
protein. This is a technology already demonstrated
in animals (and plants), including monkeys. But the news that it had been done to a
human embryo has stirred up reactions worrying about designer babies. Are we
already in a brave new world of designer babies? And how should we handle the biopolitical debate?

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Hunger is the best spice

Ghrelin is a hormone produced in the stomach that
appears to stimulate appetite. A recent paper in Cell Metabolism shows that
giving ghrelin to volunteers made their brains respond more strongly to food
images, reward systems in the brain became more active and they rated their
level of hunger higher. An immediate reaction in the blogosphere
was to consider the practical applications: Stomach hormone turns hungry people
into junkies (New Scientist), Fast Food Joints Add
Hormone to Food That Makes You Want to Eat More (Io9). Are we moving towards a future where
food will be literally addictive?

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Reverse Prostitution: cognitive biases and conditional cash transfers

Stuart Rennie writes a thoughtful blog on bioethics.net, Can
you buy changes in health behaviours? on how the World Bank backs an anti-AIDS experiment paying
young people to not contract sexually transmitted infections. The basic idea is not new, conditional cash transfer
programs in poor countries have had successes in improving health and education but applying it to sexual health moves it into more
controversial territory. Is there anything wrong with “reverse prostitution”?

Read More »Reverse Prostitution: cognitive biases and conditional cash transfers

The Dignity of the Carrot

What are you allowed to do to plants? At least in Switzerland you are not allowed to do research that deeply offend the dignity of plants. The Swiss federal Gene Technology Law stipulates that any scientific research should respect the "dignity of creation". All plant biotechnology grant applications must now state how they take plant dignity into consideration, confusing researchers.  The Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) have issued some guidelines (pdf) which make the situation even more confusing. Neither humans nor plants are likely to be helped.

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Who’s this ‘we’, Dr Soon? Unconscious Action and Moral Responsibility

A paper in Nature Neuroscience by Soon, Brass, Heinze and Haynes has demonstrated that it is possible (in
the case of a simple decision about pressing buttons) to predict what the
decision will be and when it will happen several seconds before the decision is consciously “made”. Does this demonstrate that our free will is an
illusion? That depends on what we mean by "we".

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The stresses of 24 hour creative work: How much would Aristotle blog?

New York Times writes about the stressful
lifestyle of for-pay bloggers. The bloggers get rewarded for being
prolific and quick to comment, but since the Internet never sleeps they feel a
pressure not to sleep either. The result is physical and emotional stress that
never lets up – especially since often the home is also their workplace. This
is just one example of the high stresses of many new creative class occupations. Is there any way out of knowledge-economy workaholism?

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Extinction Risks and Particle Physics: When Are They Worth it?

The Large Hadron Collider, LHC, is the worlds biggest particle accelerator and due to start investigating the structure of matter later this year. Now a lawsuit has been filed in the US calling on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to stop preparations for starting the LHC for a reassessment of the safety of the collider. The reason is fears that the high energy collisions could cause some form of devastating effect threatening the Earth: either the formation of miniature black holes, strangelets that absorb matter to make more strangelets or even a decay of the vacuum state of the universe. Needless to say, physicists are very certain there are no risks. But how certain should we be about safety when there could be a risk to the survival of the human species?

Read More »Extinction Risks and Particle Physics: When Are They Worth it?