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Rob Wilson: Ah, just a quick introduction to our next speaker.
Gregor Wolbring has spent most of his career as a biochemist
working primarily on thalidomide derivatives
and in the last
year or two he's taken the big plunge. He's always been a
leading figure, throughout most of his career on disability studies, disability rights
disability activism. But the big plunge now, moving over to the other side -
maybe not as big as the transhuman plunge you might take
at some point, or already have - is to move over to critical
rehabilitation and disability studies as his
official affiliation and fulltime job now at the University of Calgary.
He has a slightly modified title from what we had before which is up there:
The Ethics of Realpolitik, The Realpolitik of Ableism,
Albleism Ethics, Species Typical, Sub species-typical, and Beyond
species-typical. Thanks!
Gregor Wolbring: This is the talk I want to put forward and it has three areas. One is to give you
more geeky sciences, more emerging technologies. And then the other one is the
realpolitik of albleism which introduces ableism which very likely most people are not familiar with.
And then to talk about ableism, ethics, and
governance. These are my legs when I was 18. Alright.
And you can see I am not outrunning many people with that one
with that design. It is nowadays just used for teddy bears.
This is the newer version. This exists for like now five years
you can buy in Europe but not here. And what you're doing is you have little titanium rod
link it to the remaining hipbone. It fuses within six months and then you have just
an erin wrench and you click on the rest of the leg. And your body really couldn't care
less whether the extension of the bone is
metal or whether it's bone as long the angle is the right way. Right. And this one
is already outdoing the body cycling or whatever you have no chance anymore
How many of you know this one? Alright.
These are the Pistorius legs
the Paraolympic guy who wants to outrun the Olympic guys
and therefore was labelled as that he can't use them because
they're technodoping.
Here you see how it runs, cool and smooth.
As we don't want you to really amputate your legs to get
the better ones, you have to deal with this one, you get an exoskeleton
which exists. And then in essence your whole body
is an exoskeleton. You can do all kinds of stuff you can't do at the moment.
You can already rent this kind of suit. This is
a Puma ad. This is the future of your shoes.
You can see also this leg, these kangaroo legs, or what you want to call them.
They are changing. And Puma feels that this way they can sell the shoes
of the future. I donno. But you can see that we are moving along
more and more, that's the use, and we feel that this is actually the future, right.
Body has nothing to do with the future.
If you get the, if I sent you the
powerpoint, you can go to all this urls, the youtubes, and you can watch these movie.
Alright, this is the moth from the defence agency in the US
and this one was equipped with a surveillance
mechanism, a camera and so on. And you can remotely control this one.
It's a living moth, lives through a normal lifecycle and you can use it as a reconnaissance
drone. Alright. So that already exists. It flies around and you wouldn't even
see it. And it records what you're doing, what you're saying
and so on. That's a brain–machine interface from
Vancouver. Contrary to what the North America, what the US,
is doing, most countries have noninvasive version, you put just a cap on your head
and then you read. And this is a Vancouver one. This is a Swiss
one. This is another brain–machine
interface from Audeo which is a Chicago company. And what they did
is they translate thought into computer speech without any
need for actual vocal chord activity,
meant for people who simply can't speak. And it can actually indeed, it can
translate your thought over into computer speech. That already
exists, was developed by the centre in
rehab in Chicago. And it will of course be dual use
as with most of these technologies the gaming is very much interested in the Audeo
system to increase experience of the players. Right,
if they don't have to use their speech and they can just think and control...
And the first brain-computer interface put on the
market was also a gaming company called Emotiv.
So it was not a medical company, it was a gaming company that put the first one on the market,
December last year, you can buy this.
This is in essence, oh, every single body part you can see will be very likely
replaced eventually, or at least there's an ability to replace it. Every single
body part, there's someone working on some artificial replacement part
and of course, once you replace it there's no reason why you couldn't add things to it
like an artificial skin will very likely have sensor systems imbedded because there's no reason
why the artificial skin should only do exactly what the normal skin is doing.
These are just other areas, like synthetic biology for example
is a whole new line of lifeforms from the bottom up, base pair by base pair,
geoengineering, cryonics. So there's all kind of areas
which are on the go, which change simply
how the body will be. Alright, and it leads to all kinds of questions
is just a few. Like Natashia already mentioned quite a few of them like,
nature of being human, human beings, sentient beings,
body and mind, and so on. And I only cover today, really about
should we enhance or not. Alright, I mean, what is the
reason for doing so. Because it's coming.
This is from CD Net and they in essence say
that technodoping was coined the term for
Pistorius because it rattled so much the Olympic committee that
there is someone from the Paraolympic guys who actually out does the Olympic guys. That's not
the order it's supposed to be. The Paraolympic ones are
supposed to be deficient products who are second class. They are coming after the Olympics,
not out-doing the Olympics. Right. So they coined
the term technodoping, saying his legs out-do the normal legs and therefore he can't
compete against the normal guys. Right.
Despite that of course, accademically there was problem with it and that's why
the court of arbitration rejected that. But it shows that
there will be a change of guards. There will be change of the way,
how you perceive your body and your relationship to others, definitely to the
deficient products called disabled people. And that
was already seen in 2001. This is converging technology
on the nanoscale. This was a national science foundation US
report and workshop, and they could have chosen all kinds of stuff what to do with technology
like saving mankind, global health,
I mean, sustainability. And they choose performance enhancement.
And the gist is because they figure that is what I can sell
to the government, not sustainability and all this...
I mean it might be good for some people but the government will never buy into that.
Performance enhancement, that's what we can do and that's what they did. And indeed there was very little
outrage in the public on that theme, despite
that they are four hundred pages of well, body four point zero.
It's just amazing.
Alright, and there are many arguments against enhancement. I mean we don't go into them.
But you can see, many.
(audience chuckling) But all the stuff before was about enhancement.
It all changes. I mean the people who are enhancement don't have the
right arguments? Or what is going wrong here?
Alright, so is it decided so that you don't
matter what you say, arguments against enhancement it's just obsolete argument to be against
it? Or is it simply the premise from the building of the arguments
against enhancement flawed? And that's the second part and I think it's flawed,
because I don't think it accounts for certain basics of how we structure our society and that
ableism. The disability community uses this term but
I use is much broader. You can see it's really a set of beliefs, processes, and practices
based on one's abilities, a particular kind of understanding of oneself, one's body
and one's relationship with others of one's species, other species, and
one's environment. The abilities you have
and expect from yourself, really defines mostly who you are
in relationship to all kinds of different areas.
And it is about favouring certain abilities over others. Alright, because you can't have them all, so you decide
like, this is important, this is not important and then how you go on...