James Hughes

University of Massachusetts Boston | UMB · OIRAP

People have sought ways to improve their physical and mental capabilities for thousands of years. For those of us who believe that human enhancement technologies include clothes, tools and weapons, the politics of enhancement started in prehistory. The norms of pre-industrial societies that only certain castes or genders could touch specific tools...

The mental health crisis and loneliness epidemic have sparked a growing interest in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots as a potential solution. This report examines the benefits and risks of incorporating chatbots in mental health treatment. AI is used for mental health diagnosis and treatment decision-making and to train therapis...

We are likely to have immersive virtual reality and ubiquitous augmented reality in the coming decades. At least some people will use extended reality or “the metaverse” to work, play and shop. In order to achieve the best possible versions of this virtual future, however, we will need to learn from three decades of regulating the Internet. The new...

In this article, we argue that Ted Chiang's short stories offer a realist philosophy of technology, one that charts a third course between the techno-pessimism and techno-optimism that characterize the history of philosophizing about technology and much of the speculative fiction about it. We begin by surveying the history of utopian and skeptical...

Transhumanism and Unitarian Universalism are both the result of filtering ancient religious aspirations through the sieve of Enlightenment rationalism, humanism and individualism. The transhumanists aspire to transcendence through individual adoption of human enhancing technologies, while the UUs encourage transcendence through the critical, select...

This paper discusses the potential for brain stimulation and brain-computer interfaces to modulate moral emotions, cognition, and behavior. Links between brain structures and moral cognition began with studies of victims of brain injuries and became more precise with advances in brain imaging. In the last two decades, research has demonstrated that...

As the world enters this deep economic crisis, and with threats from climate change and weapons of mass destruction looming, the evolving politics of transhumanism may seem frivolous to some. But it is still my belief that in this century transhumanist advocates for Enlightenment values will be as influential in the politics of technology as their...

This essay describes trends in the organization of work that have laid the groundwork for the adoption of interactive AI-driven instruction tools, and the technological innovations that will make intelligent tutoring systems truly competitive with human teachers. Since the origin of occupational specialization, the collection and transmission of kn...

In the Myanmar democratic struggle, the Left can choose to support the demands of a popular movement, for multilateral sanctions, targeted at a key but specific industry, and focused on the role that global fossil-fueled capital plays in supporting an authoritarian regime and their kleptocratic elites. The campaign for a ban on Chevron and Total’s...

Socialists have historically thought a lot about the catastrophic risks society faces. Today many DSA chapters have gotten involved in mutual aid to respond to the Covid crisis, generating a debate about how mutual aid fits into socialist work. One form of community engagement that is likely to be increasingly necessary, and is an opportunity for r...

The ecosocialists have broad agreements about the radical political economic changes that are called for, and have largely rejected the mysanthropic and anti-technological views of some radical ecologists. But the ecosocialists differ on what role nuclear power and emerging technologies should play under a Green New Deal. The ecomodernists broadly...

Human enhancement technologies can make our lives healthier, happier and better.

Hongladarom has attempted one of the first major attempts at using Buddhist ethics to grapple with the ethical issues emerging around artificial intelligence. His arguments for machine enlightenment are innovative, and Buddhist inspired, but end up drawing the focus away from the programmers, users, and regulation of AI. He repeatedly runs up again...

The idea of artificial wombs began to be seriously discussed in the West in Britain after WWI, inspired by modern feminism and the invention of neonatal incubators. J. B. S. Haldane's imagined future use of artificial wombs in his essay Daedalus, or, Science and the Future inspired debate among his contemporaries for a decade, including Aldous Huxl...

New human enhancement technologies will radically challenge traditional religious understandings of the human project. But among the world’s faiths, Buddhists will have some distinct advantages adapting to and contributing to thinking about, a posthuman future. Buddhism and human enhancement have some affinities and some useful complementarities. I...

Since the Enlightenment, there have been advocates for the rationalizing efficiency of enlightened sovereigns, bureaucrats, and technocrats. Today these enthusiasms are joined by calls for replacing or augmenting government with algorithms and artificial intelligence, a process already substantially under way. Bureaucracies are in effect algorithms...

Human augmentation is discussed in this chapter in three axes: the technological means, the ability being augmented, and the social systems that will be affected. The technological augmentations considered range from exocortical information and communication systems, to pharmaceuticals, tissue and genetic engineering, and prosthetic limbs and organ...

Most people are neurologically incapable of living up to their own moral aspirations. Today, neuroscience is illuminating moral sentiment and cognition and generating new electronic, psychopharmaceutical, and genetic technologies for moral self-improvement. Some religious will reject the new moral enhancement technologies on the grounds that they a...

Commentary: Freedom Means Self-Awareness and Self-Control: Bioenhancement Can Help - Volume 26 Issue 3 - JAMES HUGHES

Many economists and experts have begun to argue that the increasing automation of jobs may finally create a decline in available jobs for humans. Given this pessimism, there is a need to look more closely at the questions concerning not only whether technological employment will happen, but also at some specific scenarios for it, whether we might a...

Although most human mental and physical labor will eventually be replaced by automation, complex cognitive skills, such as creativity and social-emotional intelligence, will take longer to replace. As a consequence, there may be, for a time, expanding employment opportunities for occupations that use more of those skills, such as architects, artist...

This book examines the current state of the technologically-caused unemployed, and attempts to answer the question of how to proceed into an era beyond technological unemployment. Beginning with an overview of the most salient issues, the experts collected in this work present their own novel visions of the future and offer suggestions for adapting...

The term “biopolitics” has four distinct but overlapping meanings in modern scholarship. According to Lemke’s history of the term (Lemke 2011), political scientists used “biopolitics” in a variety of ways as early as the 1920s, and the Third Reich used it to describe their eugenic plans.

Some of the debates around the concept of moral enhancement have focused on whether the improvement of a single trait, such as empathy or intelligence, would be a good in general, or in all circumstances. All virtue theories, however, both secular and religious, have articulated multiple virtues that temper and inform one another in the development...

Harry Potter is an anti-racist freedom fighter both in fiction and in the real world. Throughout the Potter novels we are drawn to sympathize with oppressed racial minorities — elves, centaurs, werewolves, half-giants, Mudbloods — and to fear and despise fascist Death Eaters intent on exterminating all non-pure-bloods (Barratt 2012). The Potter nar...

The biopolitics of intervening directly in the body with drugs, genes, and wires have always been far more fraught than the issues surrounding the use of gadgets. This chapter explores the way that conscience apps and morality software are an underexplored bridge between the traditional forms of moral enhancement and the more invasive methods that...

Robotics and artificial intelligence are beginning to fundamentally change the relative profitability and productivity of investments in capital versus human labor, creating technological unemployment at all levels of the workforce, from the North to the developing world. As robotics and expert systems become cheaper and more capable the percentage...

The question is a simple one: if in the future robots take most people's jobs, how will human beings eat? The answer that has been more or less obvious to most of those who have taken the prospect seriously has been that society's wealth would need to be re-distributed to support everyone as a citizen's right. That is the proposition we used to fra...

The personal identity conundrum is perhaps more exclusive to transhumanism than the other intra-Enlightenment debates since it is precisely the prospect of radical neuroscience that has made the erasure of the illusion of personal identity so tangible. Nick Bostrom acknowledged the problem of personal identity for transhumanism. In her 2009 essay,...

Recently, Fenton (2009) has argued that Buddhist ethics can accommodate the use of attention-enhancing drugs, and Walker (2006 , 2009) has argued that future neurotechnologies may be used to enhance happiness and virtue. This paper uses a Western Buddhist perspective, drawing on many Buddhist traditions, to explore how emerging neurotechnologies ma...

Transhumanism is a modern expression of ancient and transcultural aspirations to radically transform human existence, socially and bodily. Before the Enlightenment these aspirations were only expressed in religious millennialism, magical medicine and spiritual practices. The Enlightenment channeled these desires into projects to use science and tec...

Although I have used a version of utilitarianism to argue for both transhumanism and social democracy, and for the technoprogressive hybrid of the two, research in hedonic psychology and emerging neurotechnologies make utilitarianism an unattractive moral logic. Instead, I now argue that a version of Sen and Nussbaum's capabilities approach better...

Buddhist ethics counsels that we are not obliged to create such mind children, but that if we do, we are obligated to endow them with the capacity for this kind of growth, morality, and selfunderstanding. We are obligated to tutor them that the nagging unpleasantness of selfish existence can be overcome through developing virtue and insight. If mac...

Transhumanism, the belief that technology can transcend the limitations of the human body and brain, is part of the family of Enlightenment philosophies. As such, transhumanism has also inherited the internal tensions and contradictions of the broad Enlightenment tradition. First, the project of Reason is self-erosive and requires irrational valida...

Rob Sparrow's paper makes an argument for the gender binary as an Aristotlean ideal type which should be preserved from any deconstruction, and which should determine how people are treated. While I find the idea philosophically and politically offensive, it has an undeniable philosophical pedigree. Perhaps the paper would more make more sense simp...

Aaron Wildavsky proposed in 1987 that cultural orientations such as egalitarianism and individualism frame public perceptions of technological risks, and since then a body of empirical research has grown to affirm the riskframing effects of personality and culture (Dake, 1991; Gastil et al., 2005; Kahan, 2008). Most of these studies, however, have...

A woman's right to know the contents of her own body, and to make a choice about whether to continue her pregnancy or not, should be defended against laws trying to stop prenatal sex selection, either in the developing world or in the developed world. Restrictions on women's reproductive freedom harm the interests of women and girls, and ignore myr...

In 2000 Bill Joy proposed that the best way to prevent technological apocalypse was to "relinquish" emerging bio-, info-and nanotechnologies. His essay introduced many watchdog groups to the dangers that futurists had been warning of for decades. One such group, ETC, has called for a moratorium on all nanotechnological research until all safety iss...

Postgenderism is an extrapolation of ways that technology is eroding the biological, psychological and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory. Postgenderists argue that gender is an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation on human potential, and foresee the elimination of involuntary biological a...

The coming knowledge society will see an acceleration in the trend towards increasing human intelligence begun hundreds of thousands of years ago. Many converging technologies will facilitate this acceleration of intelligence, including psychopharmacology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and communications technology. The accelerating increase...

Advances in diagnostics and medicine are yet again changing our definition of death – and may eventually break down the concept altogether, says James Hughes

Buddhist EthicsBuddhism and MedicineNo-Personhood Ethics and ReincarnationAbortionBrain Death and Organ TransplantationSuicide, Euthanasia and the Good DeathSpeciesism and the Humane Treatment of AnimalsContraception, Sexuality, Genetic Engineering and Reproductive TechnologyBrain Science, Psychopharmacology and the Myth of the Authentic SelfHealth...

Nanotechnology Threatens Humanness?Unhelpful Ontological Concreteness in Human CognitionHuman Nature has No Clear DefinitionHuman Nature: No Clear Beginning and No Clear Boundary with Other SpeciesHuman Nature has No Clear EndingHuman Nature is Not NormativeThe Inescapable Racism of the Human Nature ConceptThe Violent Potential of the Human Racists...

Transhumanism – the proposition that human beings should use technology to transcend the limitations of the body and brain – is a product of the Enlightenment humanist tradition. As a consequence most avowed transhumanists are secular, and many religious are skeptical or hostile towards the transhumanist project. However there are also many religio...

All species are fated either to die out or to evolve into something else. All except humans, that is.

Radical life extension will likely be accompanied by new neurotechnologies which will allow thought, feeling and memories to be modified, backed up and shared. Longer life-spans and neurotechnologies will undermine the illusory discreteness and continuity of personal identity, the continuity that most life extension enthusiasts are striving for. Th...

The political terrain of the 20th century was shaped by the economic issues of taxation, labor, and social welfare and the cultural issues of race, nationalism, gender, and civil liberties. The political terrain of the 21st century will add a new dimension - technopolitics. At one end of the technopolitical spectrum are the technoconservatives, def...

Lahey Clinic Medical Ethics Journal, Winter 2006, pg 4-5 The bioconservatives are correct that we might all be happier if we were enlightened enough to be content with whatever we were dealt by fate. But that is also a formula for personal and social stasis. Transgendered individuals are entitled to access to medical technology not because, as th...

The current definitions of brain death are predicated on the prognostic observation that brain dead patients would quickly die even with intensive care. But this is now shown to be untrue.1–4 Neuroremediation technologies and advances in intensive care will make it increasingly possible to keep alive the bodies of patients who would currently be cl...

Researchers generally use nonprobability methods such as chain-referral sampling to study populations for which no sampling frame exists. Respondent-driven sampling is a new form of chain-referral sampling that was designed to reduce several sources of bias associated with this method, including those from the choice of initial participants, volunt...

Literature and Medicine 20.1 (2001) 26-38 --Eric P. Nash Throughout the twentieth century, science fiction has been deeply entwined in the popular moral imagination about the future. Novels, stories, and movies about science, technology, and moral decisions have shaped the way we think about people and the choices they make. From Mary Shelley's Fra...

Objective. Since 1985, community outreach efforts to combat acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) among injecting drug users (IDUs) in the United States have overwhelmingly depended on a provider-client model that relies on staffs of professional outreach workers. We report on a comparison of this traditional outreach model with an innovative s...

The criminalization of drug use has made it difficult to reach injection drug users (IDUs) with public health interventions. The "peer-driven intervention" (PDI) makes use of the existing social network of IDUs to educate and recruit participants in the intervention. Participant IDUs are given nominal financial rewards for being interviewed, for re...

Since 1985, community outreach efforts to combat acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) among injecting drug users (IDUs) in the United States have overwhelmingly depended on a provider-client model that relies on staffs of professional outreach workers. We report on a comparison of this traditional outreach model with an innovative social netwo...

I once believed it important to determine the ‘Buddhist view’ on many social and political questions. Today I’m much more circumspect. Buddhist texts offer few coherent views outside of the core doctrinal elements. Consequently, Buddhists, to an even greater degree than most religionists, are required to address contemporary problems in the spirit...

Past research has demonstrated that some physicians do not feel obligated to care for patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This study sought to characterize the attitudes that affect medical students' willingness to treat HIV-infected patients and to determine which attitudes are most amenable to intervention. All 414 matr...

A recent multicenter study in adult ICUs showed that doctors often fail to talk with patients about advance directives, prognosis, or the patients' pain. We assessed how well MDs and RNs in 2 NICUs communicate with parents.METHODS: We identified a subpopulation of high risk babies(<750g, Grade IV IVH, congenital anomaly, chronic lung disease) in 2...

The SUPPORT study, a large multicenter study of EOL care in adult ICUs, showed that, even for very high-risk patients, doctors were unlikely to discuss DNR orders until 24-48h prior to death. We wondered whether there were similar patterns in discussions about EOL care or DNR orders in NICUs.METHODS: Babies were eligible for the study if they met ≥...

ABSTRACT ,This article provides an introduction to some contemporary issues in medical ethics and the literature which addresses them from a Buddhist perspective. The first part of the article discusses Buddhism,and medicine,and outlines some of the main issues in contemporary,medical ethics. In the rest of the paper three subjects are considered:...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Sociology, March 1995. Includes bibliographical references.

As we enter the 21st century, we do well to consider the values implicit in science fiction, the principal arena of future speculation in popular culture. This study explored whether consumption of science fiction (SF) is correlated with distinctive socio-ethical views. SF tends to advocate the extension of value and rights to all forms of intellig...

This paper is addressed to four questions: First, what is trajectory of Western liberal ethics and politics in defining life, rights and citizenship? Second, how will neuro-remediation and other technologies change the definition of death for the brain injured and the cryonically suspended? Third, will people always have to be dead to be cryonicall...

The prospect of neurotechnologies for mood manipulation alarms some people who worry about the pernicious effects they might have. In particular there is a concern that individuals will be pressured to make themselves inauthentically happy, and tolerant of things that should make them sad or angry. The most common result of social pressures to adju...

Images of non-human intelligence in popular culture reflect our attitudes about the desirability and feasibility of a liberal democratic society. This study tests for a trend toward more positive depictions of non-human intelligence in popular culture, reflecting the gradual expansion of rights and inclusiveness of liberal democratic culture. A sec...

Abstract Postgenderism is an extrapolation of ways that technology is eroding the biological, psychological and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory. Postgenderists argue that gender is an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation on human potential, and foresee the elimination of involuntary bio...

A large body of literature uses the "doctor-patient relationship" (DPR) is if it were a discrete phenomenon with positive effects on patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes. This paper examines the three assumptions made by this literature: 1) that the DPR is a discrete dichotomous variable, rather than a poorly inter-correlated cluster of attri...