Ethics Research Focuses on Emerging Science, Technology
As legend has it, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road (Viking Press, 1957)—a book that ignited a social revolution—in just three short weeks. If you were on psychostimulants, as he was, perhaps you would be that productive, too.
Is that wrong to say? Is it cheating when students today use drugs, such as modafinil or Ritalin, to write term papers or study better for important exams? Is that fair to fellow students on the same grading curve or competing for college or graduate school admissions? How is it different from steroid use in sports, which is frowned upon if not illegal—or even different from your morning coffee, which also gives a cognitive boost?
These are the kinds of questions that will be investigated by the proposed Emerging Technologies, Policy and Ethics Center, to be housed in the College of Liberal Arts. The developing center grew out of the work of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group, a non-partisan research and education organization based in the CLA since 2007.
Ethics and social concerns are not new to university learning—they have been a cornerstone of education from the very beginning. But relatively few universities are involved in the cutting-edge field of ethics and policy in new technologies and sciences, which include human enhancement, nanotechnology, robotics, synthetic biology, geo-engineering, space development, virtual reality, military technologies and more.
“Science and technology are accelerating today, and they won’t wait for ethics and policy to catch up,” says Dr. Patrick Lin, assistant professor of philosophy and director of both the ethics research group and the proposed center. “Cal Poly—the College of Liberal Arts and the Philosophy Department in particular—is forward thinking by being one of the first universities to recognize this issue and support our effort.”
As an example of the lag time between technology and ethics, Lin points to the Human Genome Project: It took 18 years after the project started in 1990 for Congress to finally pass a bill to protect Americans from discrimination based on their genetic information.
Likewise, nearly 10 years since Napster was first shut down, society is still fumbling through privacy, copyright and other intellectual property issues in the Digital Age. And we’re still arguing about benefits and risks nearly 20 years after the first genetically modified foods were introduced.
“When you’re talking about killer robots, it’s easy to get attention,” says Lin with a laugh. “But more than capturing the public’s imagination, there are many serious questions in the technology areas in which we’re interested.
“The questions that matter here are so broad and far-reaching that no single person can answer them alone,” Lin continues. “More than getting outside our own academic departments, we need to build bridges beyond our own colleges and universities. This means talking to scientists, engineers, business leaders, lawyers, farmers and the public at large. It’s also essential to get students engaged, since they are literally our future and will be shaping these debates.”
With some grant-funded projects behind them, Lin and his colleagues—Dr. George Bekey, a resident scholar at Cal Poly who is also a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and founder of its world-leading robotics lab; Dr. Shelley Hurt, assistant professor in political science who teaches several courses on technology policy; and Dr. Keith Abney, senior philosophy lecturer and ethics board member of a local hospital—proposed the center to increase the profile of this work and to develop additional projects eligible for external funding.
To date, the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group’s inter-disciplinary projects include, among others:
- Starting an ongoing lecture series, open to the public that features talks by experts nationwide on ethical issues related to Facebook, cyber weapons, neuroscience and other topics
- Designing courses on nanotechnology and robot ethics
- Giving conference presentations at Harvard, the U.S. Naval Academy and other distinguished venues
- Developing grant-funded reports on ethics and risk arising from military robotics (Office of Naval Research, 2008) and human enhancement technologies (National Science Foundation, 2009)
- Publishing What Is Nanotechnology and Why Does It Matter? (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), with other books in progress
- Editing a volume on robot ethics (MIT Press, in preparation for 2011)
With such unusual projects, the group is helping to put a spotlight on Cal Poly in international media, including BBC Focus, BBC News, Fast Company, London Times, NewScientist, Reuters, Popular Mechanics, Science Channel, The Christian Science Monitor, and Wired. The researchers are also in demand as collaborators with such respected universities as the Australian National University, Dartmouth, Indiana University, Oxford, Stanford, the University of Virginia, Yale and many others.
“It’s fun to talk about these issues,” Lin admits. “But to consider them thoughtfully, you need an understanding of the technologies involved as well as a solid grounding in the humanities and social sciences, from economics to history to psychology to literature to theology to philosophy and more.
“A liberal arts education is essential for calibrating your moral compass and thinking through questions we haven’t had to face before,” says Lin.