Tag Archives: Biotechnology

Legal Issues of the Future

Justice by Billogs (Flickr)As the Sotomayor hearings went on this week, I talked to a reporter about legal issues that a justice might see in the next 25 years, going beyond our present obsessions. (I did not actually say that senators should ask Sotomayor about them.)

Topics included:

  • virtual reality
  • artificial intelligence
  • genetic engineering and human enhancement
  • brain technology
  • human-animal hybrids

About artificial intelligence, I said, in part:

“People have been talking about the possibility of a “singularity” (in which artificial intelligence becomes sentient) in a couple of decades. It involves two questions: if something says it’s sentient, do we believe it? And if so, do we care? It may be more of a question if it involves a biological system. Does something require a biological brain to be human?”

(Image courtesy Billogs, Flickr)

A good cloning movie at last?

Clones Bosslyn FlickrNever Let Me Go is about to start filming, with Keira Knightly in the lead role.

It is based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel by the same name, and if it retains half of the book’s seriousness, it may be the first solid cloning movie since The Boys from Brazil.

The topic has typically been dealt with at the level of pure sensationalism, as in The Sixth Day, or obscured with a quasi-mystical veneer, as in The Island.

Image courtesy Bosslyn (Flickr) — usable with attribution