A Tougher War for the US Is One of Legitimacy - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Americans for much of the past three centuries have considered themselves the vanguard of a worldwide liberal revolution. Their foreign policy from the beginning has not been only about defending and promoting their material national interests. 'We fight not just for ourselves but for all mankind,' Benjamin Franklin declared of the American Revolution, and whether or not that has always been true, most Americans have always wanted to believe that it is true. There can be no clear dividing line between the domestic and the foreign, therefore, and no clear distinction between what the democratic world thinks about America and what Americans think about themselves. "

World Future Society--Future Survey Picks Best Books for 2003: "The UK Astronomer Royal plausibly describes how new technology can increasingly disrupt society in many ways. The rising potential for terror and error, combined with growing risks of environmental disaster, makes the odds less than 50-50 that our civilization will survive 21C. "

John Tirman: The New Humanitarianism When viewing the failed states, civil wars, famines, and now the HIV pandemic, placing the NGOs at the center of the problem is a bit like blaming an ambulance driver for a patient suffering from a heart attack. The humanitarian international is—as all these writers argue with great acuity—a symptom of the systemic problem, which is to say, how the wealthy nations have organized the global order.

Recent Changes/Additions A property frequently used to characterize self organization is an increase of order which is not imposed by an external agent.

Global society that is environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, and democratically based The challenge is not just to provide a high-tech military response to terrorism, but to build a global society that is environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, and democratically based—one where there is hope for everyone. Such an effort would more effectively undermine the spread of terrorism than a doubling of military expenditures.

Ratio between defense spending and foreign aid “There is an emerging global standard set by industrialized countries, which spend $1 on aid for every $7 they spend on defense. . . . At the core, the ratio between defense spending and foreign aid signals whether a nation is guided more by charity and community—or by defensiveness.” And then the punch line: “If the United States were to follow this standard, it would have to commit about $48 billion to foreign aid each year.” This would be up from roughly $10 billion in 2002. The challenge is not just to alleviate poverty, but in doing so to build an economy that is compatible with the earth’s natural systems—an eco-economy, an economy that can sustain progress. This means a fundamental restructuring of the energy economy and a substantial modification of the food economy. It also means raising the productivity of energy and shifting from fossil fuels to renewables. It means raising water productivity over the next half-century, much as we did land productivity over the last one. This economic restructuring depends on tax restructuring, on getting the market to be ecologically honest.

Eco-economy History judges political leaders by whether they respond to the great issues of their time. For today’s leaders, that issue is how to deflate the world’s bubble economy before it bursts. This bubble threatens the future of everyone, rich and poor alike. It challenges us to restructure the global economy, to build an eco-economy.

The price of a gallon of gasoline for instance, includes the cost of production but not the expense of treating respiratory illnesses from breathing polluted air or the repair bill from acid rain damage. Nor does it cover the cost of rising global temperature, ice melting, more destructive storms, or the relocation of millions of refugees forced from their homes by sea level rise. As the market is now organized, the motorist burning the gasoline does not bear these costs... Some of the record economic prosperity of recent decades has come from consuming the earth’s productive assets—its forests, rangelands, fisheries, soils, and aquifers—and from destabilizing its climate. If we want to determine the full cost of burning gasoline, we need to calculate the indirect costs of doing so...Some studies were done, however, during the early and mid-1990s on the external cost of automobile use in the United States, including direct subsidies, such as parking subsidies, and many local environmental costs. A summary of eight of these studies by John Holtzclaw of the Sierra Club indicates that if the price were raised enough to make drivers pay some of the indirect costs of automobile use, a gallon of gas would cost anywhere from $3.03 to $8.64, with the variations largely due to how many indirect costs were covered. For example, some studies included the military costs of protecting petroleum supply lines and ensuring access to Middle Eastern oil, while others did not.

Before the bubble economy collapses The world can restructure its economy quickly if it is convinced of the need to do so. Many people—although not yet the majority—are already convinced of the need for a wholesale restructuring of the economy. The issue is not whether most people will eventually be won over, but whether they will be convinced before the bubble economy collapses...The key to restructuring the economy is the creation of an honest market, one that tells the ecological truth..The market is an incredible institution—with some remarkable strengths and some glaring weaknesses. It allocates scarce resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match. It easily balances supply and demand and it sets prices that readily reflect both scarcity and abundance. The market does, however, have three fundamental weaknesses. It does not incorporate the indirect costs of providing goods or services into prices, it does not value nature’s services properly, and it does not respect the sustainable-yield thresholds of natural systems such as fisheries, forests, rangelands, and aquifers.

Stabilizing world populationStabilizing world population at 7.5 billion or so is central to avoiding economic breakdown in countries with large projected population increases that are already overconsuming their natural capital assets. Some 36 countries, all in Europe except Japan, have essentially stabilized their populations. The challenge now is to create the economic and social conditions and to adopt the priorities that will lead to population stability in all remaining countries. The keys here are extending primary education to all children, providing vaccinations and basic health care, and offering reproductive health care and family planning services in all countries.

State of the World 2004: Consumption By the Numbers: Worldwatch Institute Press Release: "Production efficiencies of the 20th century have driven much of the consumption boom. Modern industrial workers now produce in a week what took their 18th century counterparts four years. In the U.S. only about 12 hours of work per week were needed in 2000 to produce as much as 40 hours did in 1950."...Global spending on advertising reached $446 billion in 2002 (in 2001 dollars), an almost nine-fold increase over 1950. More than half is spent in the U.S. markets....Overweight. In the United States, an estimated 65 percent of adults are overweight or obese, leading to an annual loss of 300,000 lives and at least $117 billion in health care costs in 1999. The average U.S. adult now spends 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, often alone. ...Time pressures are often linked to the need to work long hours to support consumption habits—and to upgrade, store, or otherwise maintain possessions. Americans are among the most overworked people in the industrial world, putting in 350 hours (9 workweeks) more on the job each year than the average European. ...Some 41 million passenger vehicles rolled of the world's assembly lines in 2002, five times as many as in 1950. The global passenger car fleet now exceeds 531 million, growing by about 11 million vehicles annually....In 1999, some 2.8 billion people—two in every five humans on the planet—lived on less than $2 a day. Providing adequate food, clean water, and basic education for the world's poorest could all be achieved for less than people spend annually on makeup, ice cream, and pet food....
CAN MONEY BUY HAPPINESS?
Declining happiness. Findings from the World Values Survey, an assessment of life satisfaction in more than 65 countries conducted between 1990 and 2000, indicate that income and happiness tend to track well until about $13,000 of annual income per person (in 1995 purchasing power parity). After that, additional income appears to yield only modest additions in self-reported happiness.

State of the World 2004: Richer, Fatter, and Not Much Happier: Worldwatch Institute Press Release: "In the United States today, there are more private vehicles on the road than people licensed to drive them, the Worldwatch report points out. The average size of refrigerators in U.S. households increased by 10 percent between 1972 and 2001, and the number per home rose as well. New houses in the U.S. were 38 percent bigger in 2000 than in 1975, despite having fewer people in each household on average. As a result of these consumption patterns, the United States, with just 4.5 percent of the world's population, releases 25 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. "

State of the World 2004: Richer, Fatter, and Not Much Happier: Worldwatch Institute Press Release: "'Nearly half of all global consumers now live in the developing world,' ... 'While the average Chinese or Indian consumes much less than the average North American or European, China and India alone now boast a combined consumer class larger than that in all of Western Europe.' "

State of the World 2004: Richer, Fatter, and Not Much Happier: Worldwatch Institute Press Release: "'Higher levels of obesity and personal debt, chronic time shortages, and a degraded environment are all signs that excessive consumption is diminishing the quality of life for many people. The challenge now is to mobilize governments, businesses, and citizens to shift their focus away from the unrestrained accumulation of goods and toward finding ways to ensure a better life for all.' "

State of the World 2004: Richer, Fatter, and Not Much Happier: Worldwatch Institute Press Release Around 1.7 billion people worldwide—more than a quarter of humanity—have entered the "consumer class," adopting the diets, transportation systems, and lifestyles that were limited to the rich nations of Europe, North America, and Japan during most of the last century. In China alone, 240 million people have joined the ranks of consumers—a number that will soon surpass that in the United States.

The Bubble of American Supremacy - Empire? - Global Policy Forum***: "Exploiting an event to further an agenda is not in itself reprehensible. It is the task of the President to provide leadership, and it is only natural for politicians to exploit or manipulate events so as to promote their policies. The cause for concern lies in the policies that Bush is promoting, and in the way he is going about imposing them on the United States and the world. He is leading us in a very dangerous direction. "..the American model, which has indeed been successful, is not available to others, because our success depends greatly on our dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system, and we are not willing to yield it...The Bush doctrine, first enunciated in a presidential speech at West Point in June of 2002, and incorporated into the National Security Strategy three months later, is built on two pillars: the United States will do everything in its power to maintain its unquestioned military supremacy; and the United States arrogates the right to pre-emptive action. In effect, the doctrine establishes two classes of sovereignty: the sovereignty of the United States, which takes precedence over international treaties and obligations; and the sovereignty of all other states, which is subject to the will of the United States. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. To be sure, the Bush doctrine is not stated so starkly; it is shrouded in doublespeak. The doublespeak is needed because of the contradiction between the Bush Administration's concept of freedom and democracy and the actual principles and requirements of freedom and democracy. Talk of spreading democracy looms large in the National Security Strategy. But when President Bush says, as he does frequently, that freedom will prevail, he means that America will prevail. In a free and open society, people are supposed to decide for themselves what they mean by freedom and democracy, and not simply follow America's lead...

The Bubble of American Supremacy - Empire? - Global Policy Forum***: "Even so, September 11 could not have changed the course of history to the extent that it has if President Bush had not responded to it the way he did. He declared war on terrorism, and under that guise implemented a radical foreign-policy agenda whose underlying principles predated the tragedy. Those principles can be summed up as follows: International relations are relations of power, not law; power prevails and law legitimizes what prevails. The United States is unquestionably the dominant power in the post-Cold War world; it is therefore in a position to impose its views, interests, and values. "..This foreign policy is part of a comprehensive ideology customarily referred to as neoconservatism, though I prefer to describe it as a crude form of social Darwinism. I call it crude because it ignores the role of cooperation in the survival of the fittest, and puts all the emphasis on competition. In economic matters the competition is between firms; in international relations it is between states. In economic matters social Darwinism takes the form of market fundamentalism; in international relations it is now leading to the pursuit of American supremacy. Before September 11 the ideologues were hindered in implementing their strategy by two considerations: George W. Bush did not have a clear mandate (he became President by virtue of a single vote in the Supreme Court), and America did not have a clearly defined enemy that would have justified a dramatic increase in military spending. September 11 removed both obstacles.

US: A Bigger Stick - And No Longer Speaking Softly - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "But the war on terror - the first major armed conflict of the 21st century - has also visited a kind of regime change on the world as a whole. Its most powerful entity, the US - backed by its unparalleled military and economic might - seems more imperial than ever before. "...More than mere domination, the American superpower now seeks to control history," writes Robert Jay Lifton, a Harvard expert on terrorism, in a recent issue of The Nation magazine. Professor Lifton calls this the "Superpower Syndrome," the title of his recent book. Like the Roman and British empires before it, America inevitably flexes its muscle because it has cornered the technology that offers unrivaled military dominance, he argues....But as Ronald Reagan pointed out about the former Soviet Union, the concern has less to do with declared intentions and more with capabilities and recent actions. And here, the US looks like a juggernaut. It has not only visited regime change on two nations in two years, it spends more on its armed forces than the next dozen countries combined - $382.2 billion last year. Imperial powers have always been backed by superior military force. Armies of the Roman Empire dominated the land masses of Europe and North Africa, and parts of the Middle East. Navies of the Spanish and British empires ruled the seas. Twenty-first century warfare and power projection hinge on control of the air. Today, no other country comes close to US air power...The US dominates the skies to a far greater degree than Roman legions controlled the ground or the British fleet ruled the seas. ..The rest of the world also watches in disquiet as the US tries to widen its military lead with new technology. "Nonlethal" weapons, laser- and satellite-guided ordnance, remote-controlled attack aircraft that can loiter over a battlefield for hours before striking, cruise missiles with high-power microwaves to zap an enemy's electronic gear, and a new generation of small, "bunker busting" nuclear bombs offer the possibility of moving from the cold war's relatively static "mutually assured destruction" to actual warfare. The US also appears intent on militarizing space. A congressionally mandated commission headed by Secretary Rumsfeld has called for "superior space capabilities ... both to deter and to defend against hostile acts in and from space."

In 2,000 Years, Will the World Remember Disney or Plato? - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "'The US has become the most powerful, significant world force in terms of cultural imperialism [and] expansion,' says Ian Ralston, American studies director at Liverpool John Moores University. 'The areas that particularly spring to mind are Hollywood, popular music, and even literature.' But what some call 'McDomination' has created a backlash in certain cultures. And it's not clear whether fast food, Disney, or rock 'n' roll will change the world the way Homer or Shakespeare has.

Beijing's deepening pockets mean it can spend on quantitative and qualitative military improvements. Defense budgets have increased more than 10 percent annually for 13 consecutive years, bringing the official figure in 2003 to $22.4 billion. However, China's real military spending might be much higher: The official spending figure does not include weapons purchases, research and development or other costs; foreign estimates put the total figure at $35 billion to $65 billion.

Foreign Policy To overcome opposition when the WTO was established in 1995, promoters promised benefits eerily similar to those trotted out before Cancún: billions of dollars in global economic growth and the reduction of poverty in poor nations. Not only has the WTO failed to deliver on such promises, but numerous countries are suffering economic, environmental, and social harm after implementing the global body’s mandates. This harm highlights the WTO’s key contradiction: Shouldn’t those living with the results determine the policies versus having them imposed by the WTO?

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: "The problem is that technical advances will in themselves render society more vulnerable to disruption. 'We are entering an era when a single person can, by one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or render a city uninhabitable for years, and when a malfunction in cyberspace can cause havoc worldwide to a significant segment of the economy.' These threats are growing for three reasons: 1) the destructive and disruptive capabilities available to an individual trained in genetics, bacteriology, or computer networks will grow as science advances; 2) society is becoming more integrated and interdependent; 3) instant communications mean that the psychological impact of even a local disaster has worldwide repercussions on attitudes and behavior."

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: "'we live in an extraordinarily fluid time, when choices made today will have massive consequences for tomorrow.' The difference between rosy and gloomy global scenarios boils down to a single word: governance, or the ways in which groups of people collectively make choices. Governments are obviously a big part of global governance, but corporations are playing an increasingly larger role, as well as a vast and growing array of nonprofit groups. The current system for running the world is based on rules set in the mid-20th century, in the wake of WWII, based on assumptions that a handful of great powers will make most of the decisions. The world of the early 21st century is quite different, with humanity facing many threats, but responses largely adding up to unimaginative muddling through. "

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: "Foreign Policy: we are in a new age of American dominance, with debate between Hegemonists (who believe the US should unabashedly exercise its power) and Globalists (who reject unilateralism and emphasize international law and institutions);"

Welcome to Future Survey Abstracts: "Additions to the stock of knowledge probably provide the best hope for long-range economic expansion "

Mergers and the Supersizing of Business - Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum: "Mergers, megamergers and empire-building corporate weddings are back in vogue on Wall Street. Almost every day, there is news of some new billion-dollar combination: banking, healthcare, and tobacco in just the past few days. Behind the new surge in acquisitions is a much healthier stock market. Since the beginning of the year, stock prices are up between 15 and 20 percent. This has given companies the means to snap up competitors - some weakened by an economic downturn. "

The Future Human" Workshop Roboticist Hans Moravec thinks that the advent of intelligent robots will represent a pivotal point in human culture, much like the advent of writing, or of computers, or of the internet. “The first intelligent computers will provide us with unimaginable wealth brought on by the fantastic levels of productivity. Within 20 years, computers will be built that process information faster than human brains. By 2020 there is a technological singularity that enables us to move ahead very fast with the help of super-intelligent robots.”

The Future Human" Workshop Humans will start to self-direct their own evolution. For better or worse, we are gaining the power to redesign ourselves in what has been called “self-directed” or “conscious” evolution. Biotechnologies are providing powers to intervene in human bodies and minds that go beyond the traditional goals of healing the sick, to threaten fundamental changes in human nature and the meaning of humanity. These technological changes have brought us to a crucial fork in the road. We are compelled to decide nothing less than whether human procreation is going to remain human, whether children are going to be made to order, rather than be begotten, and whether we wish to say yes in principle to the road that leads to the dehumanized hell of Brave New World.”

The Future Human" Workshop “In considering the future, there are three dominant threads—science and technology, demography, and governance. By science and technology, we mean things like genetics, brain science, materials (nanotechnology or other yet-to-be invented materials that may replace plastics, etc.), energy, and information technology. By demography, we mean: What is the distribution of human beings in space and time? By governance, we mean: How are those people organized?

The Future Human" Workshop “Human culture and scientific invention represent the most potent force—in terms of potential for change at unexampled rapidity—ever unleashed upon the planet. Biological evolution cannot possibly achieve even one percent of the potential speed of human cultural change,” said Stephen Jay Gould. Ideas arise in human minds and, with modern communication technologies, can readily jump from mind to mind until hundreds of millions share an idea. These “memes,” as they have been called, can be pure entertainment or they can represent political (democracy, communism) or religious (Islam) ideals or calls to action....How will this play out in an increasingly interconnected global culture?

The Future Human" Workshop“technological progress, particularly in the life sciences, is rushing out of control and violating important moral boundaries. The rapid development of new and increasingly sophisticated biotechnologies has raised difficult questions of values for societies, particularly questions regarding human identity, social relations, use of resources, and our relation to the natural world...The technologies go beyond safety, efficacy, and cost. They change the meaning of what it is to be human. They don’t come at once. They come piecemeal. You get used to them without thinking.””

The Future Human" Workshop Scientists and philosophers, since the days of Aristotle and Plato, have pondered such eternal questions as the nature of reality and the nature of the physical world in a quest to understand human identity and our place in the universe. Today, advances in scientific fields as varied as medicine, genetics and genetic engineering, biology, ecology, nanotechnology, robotics, space exploration, and cosmology continue to push the frontiers of human knowledge. Technology also has fundamentally reshaped patterns of social organization. We have unlocked energy from fossil fuels; developed energy prime movers (electricity generation, internal combustion engines) for human use; created information technologies (computer, fiber optics communication) that allow us to process, share, and store information—to name but three examples. A series of 20th century revolutions have pushed us through a nuclear age, a space age, biomedical revolutions, gene splicing, advances in reproductive technologies, brain research, and a trend toward globalization of commerce and government.While technological and scientific advances may be drivers of social change, we still have the neural architecture of our cave-dwelling ancestors. We remain influenced by our history, by our culture, and by the potential for seemingly intractable conflicts of the kind that have long plagued human societies. We see today a growing tension between these two forces.

The Future Human" Workshop We don’t understand the human body. We don’t understand human cells. We don’t understand the human mind—that is why it is dangerous to try to go with improvements. Even though technically we could do some of the things now—like transgenic humans; we could make a transgenic human right now—but for scientific, ethical, and moral reasons, we should not do it.

The Future Human" Workshop Enhancement may include not just traditional categories above the average. Look at this case: We now know the gene that causes some insects to see in the ultraviolet. Wouldn’t it be interesting if some of us could see in the ultraviolet? It might not be profitable and it could even be destructive, but this would be an enhancement in which you go beyond the normal range of expectations or of possibilities for most people. Some of it might be exogenous to our species. Some of it might be endogenous to our species...However, what we might look at as true enhancement would be adding new or non-human traits such as allowing us to see in the UV, probably by using synthetic genes, genes that are really not within the human repertoire, and that is where we are headed if we are talking about forced evolution of the human species into something that isn’t human, á la Greg’s book [Redesigning Humans], for example.

The Future Human" Workshop The real question is: What are the ends we can safely assume will continue for human beings that will lead us to want to use these technologies to change human nature? The ends, for any foreseeable future, will be that people will want to live longer; they will want to have more abilities; they will want to have less disease and more able bodies; they will want to be happier; and they will want to be smarter. If you just assume that all of those are intrinsic goals of human life, all the technologies will, both for corrective purposes and for enhancement purposes, serve those ends to the extent that we allow people to use them.

The Future Human" Workshop We have to recognize the existence of uncertainty at all
times.

"The Future Human" Workshop... the question of self-designed evolution for humans, and some of the controversies might be laid to rest when people realize that although our genes define us as a species, our neurons define us as individuals...We have for the first time in any species in history developed the capability to intervene and influence our own evolution...We can do something absolutely unique in history: influence our own evolution and also the evolution of every other species with which we choose to intervene.

The Future Human" Workshop 700 million years ago when single cells joined together to form multicellular organisms—because we are joining together by our technologies, by our communications technologies, by our trade, to produce a cooperative that is as intimately connected as are the cells in a multicellular organism....The fact that we can even envision the future, for instance, is not coming out of our individual concepts; it is extracted from all the information that is scattered and distributed around us—a sort of a global brain....the fundamental breakthroughs that are occurring now, which are unique to this time—in fact, they are without precedent in the history of life—are, first, that we are creating nonliving materials (silicon) and constructing it at a level that it is achieving the complexity of life itself. This is going to go on. In fact, intelligence will probably exceed that of human intelligence in noncarbon substrates. Nothing like this has ever happened before. The second thing that is occurring is that we are beginning to manipulate our own biology consciously, so that we are basically seizing control over our own evolution, and we will radically transform ourselves. The third is that we are moving out into space. For the first time in the history of life, life is escaping from this thin film on the surface of the planet and pushing out toward the stars.

"The Future Human" Workshop Society, of whatever kind, is built up by individual human beings. It will, therefore, reflect the average view, abilities, and so on of these human beings. Number Two is that human beings themselves are pretty much determined by two things: by their genes (their genomes) and by their culture. We can say, “by genes and memes,” to say it in simple words. Number Three: The lifetime of memes may sometimes be radically shortened or changed, as by revolutions, for example, the French Revolution. On the other hand, genes are very long-lived and permanent. The average lifetime of a gene is about three million years, I understand. So, when you look at the future of humanity, you should start with what is really the basis: the genes and memes, and how these may change.

"The Future Human" Workshop Humans of the future—with infrared vision and muscle implants—may be technologically as well as biologically enhanced. One cyborgian, Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, thinks the artificial part will one day predominate. He believes that “we will enhance our brains gradually through direct connection with machine intelligence until the essence of thinking has fully migrated to the far more capable and reliable machinery.” Such talk strikes many humanists and theologians as hubristic and exaggerated. Since Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that humans are created in God’s image, the idea of artificial intelligence is as unsettling as the idea of germline engineering. But many scientists think that, like it or not, it will happen....STOCK: “We are in the midst of an evolutionary transition as significant as that 700 million years ago when complex multi-cellular organisms evolved. Future humans will look back on this era (the next few hundred years) as one of the most extraordinary in the history of life, a period when the key developments that have shaped the form and character of their existence—genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and space travel—took place.”

BROOKS: “Emotions are our current last bastion of specialness. Computers are not only able to calculate better than humans, but do many tasks better than humans. Computers are now better at doing symbolic algebra than are humans. We many have lost our central location in the universe; we may have lost our unique creation heritage … we may have been beaten out by machines in pure calculating and reason, but we still have our emotions. This is what makes us special. Machines do not have them, and we alone do.”

"The Future Human" Workshop Robot: I tried to come up with some simple rules that would enable it to survive in its environment. I gave the spider what it needed to make quick decisions in order to avoid or move towards certain objects. One simple idea was that instead of telling it to avoid objects, I said, ‘Just go for the spaces between objects.’” Brooks’s robots can carry out surprisingly complex behavior based on a few simple rules.

"The Future Human" Workshop All life is made up of cells. But the life spans of living organisms vary greatly—from round worms that live a few days to Joshua trees that live for 5,000 years. Evolution has been able to adjust different organisms’ life spans to suit various competing survival needs. Can scientists do the same? With animals the answer is a defi- nite yes. Scientists have been able to increase the life span of round worms by a factor of six with very simple genetic manipulations. If the same things could be done for humans, we might live for 500 years or more.

"The Future Human" Workshop At the start of the 20th century an American woman’s life expectancy was 46 years; today it is 79.

"The Future Human" Workshop Before Dolly, many scientists doubted that ordinary specialized cells could be converted to embryonic stem cells, but the cloning of Dolly showed that, in principle, the mature fate could be reprogrammed to that of its embryonic state. Stem cells are the Holy Grail of biology, and scientists don’t want the fear of cloning to stand in their way. They even use a distinct term for it: therapeutic cloning....What they have found is that the stem cells seem to take their signal from their situation and the surrounding cells and then “decide” what kinds of cells to become. Mesenchymal cells, for example, will in different settings form bone, cartilage, and stroma....The body is designed as a selfassembling system. Given the right cues, cells will organize themselves into the tissue or structure appropriate for that position in the body. It is a society of cell types, all communicating.

"The Future Human" Workshop Every cell in a human body has a full complement of DNA—eye cells have the same DNA as muscle cells— but in all specialized cells, most of the DNA is silent; most of the genes are turned off. Only the genes necessary for a particular cell (for example, skin genes) are “expressed.” It wasn’t always that way. At the start of life, when an organism is an eight-celled embryo, each of the eight cells has the potential to become any cell in the body. These totipotent stem cells then start to take on definite fates. As they divide and divide, the cells become specialized and lose their “plasticity”—ending up as either a muscle cell or a skin cell or one of the several hundred other cell types in the mammalian body. The miracle ofembryogenesis is that cells magically self-assemble into the myriad tissues of the body by means of positional information mediated by chemical signals. When an organ or limb has reached its determinedsize it “knows” to stop growing (p32).

"The Future Human" Workshop Since 1997, scientists have been able to do something else that has never before happened in nature (with the special exception of identical twins)—cloning. Lucy looks like any normal kitten. But Lucy is, in fact, a clone. She was made by taking a skin cell from an adult cat. The nucleus of that cell—which had become specialized to make only skin cells—was, through a piece of scientific magic, “reset” to its embryonic state (when it had the potential to make any of the hundreds of kinds of cell types that compose a cat), injected into an egg, and implanted. Lucy is the result. Lucy has no mother and father; she was born by asexual reproduction. She is a genetic copy of the cat that provided the skin cell nucleus. Lucy is an evolutionary freak.

"The Future Human" Workshop The notion of human equality is fundamental to many societies. In politics humans are accorded special rights—to vote, for example— based on a presumed special essence that no animal or machine possesses. Even though the rich and successful can pass on privileges, they can’t take away rights and they can’t so far embed advantages genetically. Will genetic enhancement destabilize our political institutions? I think that we should be acutely concerned.”

"The Future Human" Workshop Today the genetic lottery of sexual reproduction guarantees that the son or daughter of a parent will not necessarily inherit his or her talents and abilities. Germline engineering reverses the “unfairness” of this genetic lottery, making good genes a matter of choice, not accident of birth. Another approach scientists are working on is artificial chromosomes. By adding a new pair of artificial chromosomes to the embryo (chromosomes that have been engineered with all the latest genetic enhancements), designer babies could be produced.”
The Human Genome Project has proceeded so rapidly that it is highly probable that in a century or two most of the mysteries of biology (which took millions of years to evolve) will be understood and mastered. Some scholars have argued that one danger of this technology is that in the future, social elites may be able to control the genetic odds for their offspring. Will this undermine the notion of universal human dignity and lead to a bifurcation of the species into Genrich and Genpoor humans?

"The Future Human" Workshop Science and technology have always challenged beliefs about the nature of humanity. The world’s religions have had to accommodate discoveries about the creation of the universe and the Earth’s place in it; they have had to acknowledge the scientific theory of the origin of humanity and the human animal’s relationship to other living things. But the scientific advances of the past 50 years in science pose perhaps the greatest challenge to our self-image. If human evolution can be self-directed, if humans can be redesigned, then what happens to our beliefs about human nature, human rights, and human dignity—beliefs that underpin our religious, political, and legal institutions? What happens to long-established constructs like free will and consciousness?