Folie 1

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shifting grounds from tomorrows people to
todays challenges
Oxford, March 2006 nordmann_at_phil.tu-darmstadt.de
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quick to believe

• There is no stop button in the race for human
  re-engineering
• Science will soon give some of us the tools to
  make ourselves cleverer and stronger. What will
  it mean for our humanity?
• Madeleine BuntingMonday January 30, 2006
• Guardian

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quick to believe

• Sound far-fetched? It's anything but. This is
  the most conservative of a range of scenarios
  about the possibilities of human enhancement
  that have prompted fierce debate in the US and
  are exercising many a scientist's mind around the
  world.

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under the spell of the if and then

• Yet as the technologies for human enhancement
  start moving from the pages of science fiction
  into the laboratory, and eventually into the
  marketplace, ...
• (James Wilsdon, Financial Times, February 7,
  2006)

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transfixed by a plot
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NBIC convergence and CTEKS
?
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human enhancement?
Transient Acute Depression Induced by HF-DBS
Bejjani N Engl J Med 1999
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state of the art

• Current BCI-BMI applications are one-way
  communication systems (e.g. spelling devices).
  Current state-of-the-art allows processing 40
  bits/min. This is far too slow for effective
  communication, but a large improvement with
  respect to a couple of years ago (only 2 bits/min
  in 2002). ...
• ... Assuming a similar rate of progress, a
  communication speed similar to natural speech
  might be achieved by 2020. ??!

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extended reach
The most impressive achievement perhaps was when
he was able to demonstrate that from the U.S he
could control a robotic arm in the U.K.
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extended reach the other way
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CTEKS on technical and commercial limits
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CTEKS on economic contexts for BMIs
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CTEKS on limits of convergence
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Converging Technologies for European Knowledge
Societies (CTEKS)

• humans will achieve their true potential
  through technological innovation
• technology will achieve its true potential
  through social innovation

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engineering for (not of) the mind
technology will achieve its true potential
through social innovation
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easily said, blatantly wrong
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instead

• Agriculture, plumbing, transportation systems
• do not transcend human physical and cognitive
  limits but adapt the world to these limits
• give us new control and new dependencies, make us
  free and unfree at once.
• By wishing to extend human capacities,
• current visions of enhancement seek to liberate
  us from the need to invent technology that ever
  more creatively calibrates a complex world to
  limited human capacities.

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whats progressive here?

• The basic impulse behind transhumanism is a
  progressive one a desire to extend current
  models of medicine and healthcare in ways that
  would enable us to live longer, fitter and more
  fulfilling lives.
• (James Wilsdon, Financial Times, February 7,
  2006)

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• download this presentation at
• www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/phil/nordmann