INTERNATIONAL EVENT’S CALENDAR
Brave New World? Genetic Engineering & Human Dignity
Hilton, Pasadena, California, USA, August 2-5, 2012
Journal of Interdisciplainary Studies Call for Papers for August World Congress:
Genetic engineering poses a challenge equal to AI’s “transhumanism” in its implications for human dignity and the very notion of what it means to be human. Indeed, there seems to be a confluence of gentech and AI since they are closely related. While gentech promises unprecedented new powers for humans to redesign God’s creation, AI seems to provide the necessary technology for manipulating such a Brave New World. Gentech’s enormous potential benefits include altered plants which can withstand diseases or vicissitudes of climate and thus yield more abundant crops to possibly end hunger in the world.
New discoveries in bio-sciences, such as the ability to grow skin tissue from DNA to repair damaged or burnt skin of fire or accident victims, may extend to growing entire organs or limbs which could revolutionize medicine, replacing organ transplants and prosthetics. Just like in nature, where amphibians can re-grow missing limbs, humans might be able to do the same. As with many successful human inventions, from the submarine to the airplane, nature has the secret key to regeneration processes which gentech might discover. But gentech’s social, psychological, and spiritual implications pose even greater challenges to human self-understanding.
As in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, the central question concerns not only science or technique, but their impact on human self-identity and free choice. Gentech and AI may appear to replace God and elevate man in His place, since the new powers promise to fulfill humanity’s quest for self-sufficiency and immortality. As stewards of God's creation, we face the challenge, then: how can science and technology benefit, rather than enslave, all humanity? [READ MORE…]