Engineering Our Humanity
Melanie Challenger
Instructor
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Melanie ChallengerAuthor of How to Be Animal: a new history of what it means to be human
Categories
About the Course
The fourth industrial revolution brings with it both promise and peril. For the first time, we have technologies that allow us to engineer what it is to be human. Whether it's synthetic bodies or edited genes, the control we have over our biology is growing every day. But will this make dreams of longer lives, endless health, and even immortality come true? Or are we entering dystopia?
By the end of the course, you will have learnt:
- A brief history of human enhancement.
- How gene editing has the power to change our lives, for better or worse.
- How modern technology can allow us to realistically modify our brains.
- The importance of establishing an ethics for this technology.
- The trouble with modern bioethics.
As part of the course, there are in-video quiz questions to consolidate your learning, and discussion boards to have your say.
IAI Academy courses are designed to be challenging but accessible to the interested student. No specialist knowledge is required.
About the Instructor
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Melanie Challenger
Melanie Challenger is a writer and broadcaster on environmental history, philosophy of biology, and bioethics. She is Deputy Co-Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and a Vice President of the RSPCA. She hosts the podcast The Psychosphere on agency and intelligence in nature.
Course Syllabus
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Part One: The Game ChangersGene editing technologies and brain-machine interfaces are possible pathways to enhancing aspects of our biology. So how do these game changers work?
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Part Two: Dream or Jeopardy?Technology works through scientific research, data and formulae. But what technology is developed and how it is used is far from objective. And what determines whose hands this technology falls into?
Suggested Further Readings
- Harari, Y. N., Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, (London: Vintage, 2017).
- Fukuyama, F., Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
- Bostrom, N., Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- Savulescu, J., & Bostrom, N., Human Enhancement, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- Harris, J., Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
- Rose, N., The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
