Stadiums have always been places where authority over the field is on the hands of a specific individual or group, yet all events are also seen first-hand by the crowd. This combination is emotionally and socially very powerful — the Romans, who among other public institutions invented this form of public spectacle, were very well aware of this fact.

Cameras don’t change this equation, they just apply it elsewhere. TV cameras first, and later ubiquitous cellphones with cameras, have turned the entire world into a stadium. Just as every decision made by a referee is instantly evaluated by thousands or millions of people, every act by a cop, customer, salesperson, or anybody else is liable to be filmed, distributed, and discussed. The novelty of video scandals lies on how universal this self-surveillance by society is becoming, not in the fact that we do it.

Neither soccer associations nor businesses in general would need to invest much on technology in order to add video to their formal decision processes. If they let people submit them, every call by a referee would be within seconds both backed and attacked by thousands of cellphone clips shot from all angles in the stadium. The same goes for government offices, grocery stores, and schools. Customer satisfaction questionnaires, suggestion boxes, and formal quality assessments look a bit old-fashioned when you realize that most everybody they interact with has a camera on their pocket. Yet the same organization that spends much money trying to understand how the people it serves sees it, can also spend much money forbidding the use of cameras in its premises, or just not offering a way for this video feedback to reach it. This ‘buries’ most compromising videos… and makes sure that the really damaging ones will be seen by millions.

The problem, besides institutional inertia, is filtering and collating all the potential information. Few images show or can show the unbiased truth, and by now we are all, consciously or unconsciously, experienced image manipulators with an instinctive understanding of the power of editing to modify the implication and emotional impact of images. If soccer referees were to use in their decisions videos submitted by spectators, their calls would likely be more informed, but not clearer, and certainly not easier to make.

A government trying to catch corrupt officers, or a business manager assessing the quality of their customer service, has potentially much to gain by crowdsourcing this surveillance to the very people they are trying to help, people who often has technological tools and know-how that matches or surpasses those of the organizations. But crowdsourcing self-surveillance opens huge problems concerning fairness and proof; you can’t crowdsource management to the population at large any more than you can crowdsource the refereeing of a soccer match to the fans. We film what we care about, but we are seldom objective about it.

Yet attempting to ban cameras is already a losing proposition. Any mistaken decision or mistreatment, well-intentioned or not, is likely to end online. The world is now, in a way, a giant stadium, and every manager is refereeing a game. Unlike sports, where the playing field is perfectly enclosed and the rules are clear so it’s in principle possible to achieve a complete picture that everybody will agree on, business and society are too complex for that. If what the organization does matters to people, then sooner or later it’ll hear yelling from the grades, and know that videos of what just happened are being shown everywhere.

Nobody has figured out yet an organizational or technological adaptation to a world where every single customer has a camera and, potentially, a hit online TV show. But it’s definitely something worth thinking about.

Would you run into a burning building to try to save a baby you knew was trapped inside? Would it make a difference if that baby was your own?



Would you run into a burning building to try to save an 80 year-old woman you knew was dying of cancer? What if she was your mother?

Imagine working in a triage unit during wartime or following a natural disaster. Given limited medical supplies and severe constraints on available personnel, how would you decide who gets treated first?

Does it matter more that 17,000 children die of hunger every day, or that another 130,000 people die each day from other causes?

Assuming we can’t do everything all at once, should we place more emphasis on reducing preventable deaths among underprivileged children, or in extending healthy lifespans for aging adults?

In other words, whose death matters most?

Although it doesn’t answer all the questions one may have had after the series finale, such as the nature of Starbuck or the Cylon god, it does closely follow the events of the series, providing answers to questions such as how Shelly Godfrey disappeared and why Boomer didn’t kill Adama when she attempted to assassinate him. It was exciting that this version of events showed the perspective of Cylons, although it was disappointing that Cavil, the one character focused on his desire to reach beyond his human limitations, was portrayed as loveless and clinging to his contempt for his surviving creators.

The Plan goes back to slightly before the attack on the Colonies. We get to see what the Final Five and Cavil were doing at the time of the attack, as well as an excellent reproduction of the Cylons’ launching the nuclear holocaust on the Colonies. Cavil, ungrateful that he was brought into existence by humanity and the Final Five, seeks out Ellen and Anders to see that they learn their lesson. When Cavil finds Ellen in a bar, she states that she’s lived in this world a long time, and she’s proud to say she hasn’t learned any godsdamned lessons. Cavil wants her, Anders and the rest of the Final Five to live on and see the error of their ways. He says it’s cruel to keep them alive, but it’s necessary because even after 30 years they’ve yet to observe the moral failings of humanity.

To follow Anders, Cavil takes his guise as a priest, musing to Anders that humanity is full of sin and perhaps humanity got what it deserved, that even if the attack was not punishment from the Gods, perhaps the Cylons have taken over that role. Cavil is eager to hear Anders’ confession, but when he doesn’t seem repentant in the way that Cavil would like, he asks if Anders can forgive the Cylons for the holocaust, and suggests that the Cylons had their reasons for the attack, which Anders does not take well.

Back on the Galactica, we see a copy of Cavil coordinating with the Cylons in the fleet, and are provided with a more thorough explanation for many of the activities of the Cylons in the first season. As Doral has become too recognizable he is sent on a suicide mission. We see another aspect of Boomer’s struggle as a sleeper agent, as even when she’s aware of her identity as a Cylon her love for Chief Tyrol and Adama prevents her from carrying out her own suicide mission.  We also see a Simon living in the fleet who was not in the first season. He has his own wife and family that he loves, and is unhappy about being called in to help with Cavil’s plan to finish off the human species. When he is told by Cavil to blow up the ship he lives on, he ultimately decides to take his own life instead, airlocking himself outside of the range of a resurrection ship. He leaves a note for his wife, saying that love outlasts death.

Cavil doesn’t seem to understand this concept, as he does not understand when Anders tells him that whether someone died wouldn’t affect how much he loved them. Unfortunately, throughout the show we see few redeeming qualities of Cavil, and we do not even hear much more about how he wants to become more than his creators made him, aside from comments to Boomer that Cylons shouldn’t have to breathe. When Boomer tells him that she’s happier when she believes she’s human, that she actually likes herself then, he tells her to never say that, “because if that were true they win.” When the Chief comes to Cavil for counseling about nightmares he’s been having that he is a Cylon, the Chief agrees with Cavil’s suggestion that he’s scared of trusting others, to which Cavil responds that he should be scared of trusting others because every single one lets you down.

It would seem that Cavil is intentionally made out to be evil. In his chapel in the fleet, there is a young boy we see several times who tries to sleep there. Cavil repeatedly shoos him away, though eventually he gives in and allows him to stay there. Cavil even eats an apple with him, and comments to the boy that they’ve become friends. After the boy shrugs in agreement, Cavil takes the knife he used to cut the apple and silently kills him, saying that “friends are dangerous things.”

If Cavil is so upset with his creators for making him what he is, then why does he cling to revenge instead of seeking to improve himself? It would have been great to see his plans to expand his senses to experience supernovas with the full electromagnetic spectrum, or to see how he engineered away his requirement for sleep. Instead, all we see are his poorly executed attempts to eliminate the remainder of humanity, or to teach the Final Five the error of their ways by making them undergo the horror of being kept alive as humans in the wake of a nuclear devastation. If Cavil doesn’t like the human body and mind he’s been given, then why does he keep acting like a twisted human focused on pettiness such as revenge, rather than focusing on making himself the best machine he could be?

The solution to being poorly designed by one’s creators is not to teach those creators a lesson; it is to redesign oneself in a better form. Cavil could start by trying to engineer away the bitterness he has for his creators. At the very least, even a human-like mind has some capacity to rise above such things, and Cavil would have done well to use that capacity while he waited, however long it took, to develop the technology he needed to enhance his senses and improve his mind and body. With resurrection, he could have waited as long as it took. Instead, as we saw in the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons’ entanglement with the humans not only causes suffering on both sides, but leaves Cavil without the Resurrection Hub he needs for immortality. In the end of the series, Cavil commits suicide when his attempts to regain resurrection technology fail.

The Plan ends with the events of the end of the second season, as we see two Cavils discussing their fate as they wait to be airlocked. The Cavil who was on Caprica is finally willing to admit that it was a mistake to annihilate the human race, although the Galactica Cavil promises to box him. Although it was disappointing that The Plan didn’t provide a more sympathetic perspective on Cavil, we are at least treated to a fine ending for the last Battlestar Galactica movie. After we see the Cavils vented out the airlock, the camera zooms out to a brilliant display of stars and we once again hear Cavil saying:

“I don’t want to be human…I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter…I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me…I’m a machine and I could know much more.”

In a 2007 interview for Enhancing Me, Todd Huffman spoke about the importance of social enhancements and the social value of enhancements. Email, he pointed out, is only any use if possessed by at least two people. Similarly, it’s all very well thinking about what you, the individual, would like to enhance given that the rest of the world stays the same. But the rest of the world may be changing too, with you or independently of you.

Consider how, when you present your body in different guises, the world’s reaction to you changes. That applies to clothes, makeup and shoes, but also to body modification, body art, injury and “disability.” It seemed to me that part of the very attraction of transhumanism and human enhancement was this element of exploration of a new space of human social identity, or interaction experience.

We could perhaps, uploading permitting, experience quite different relations to the world and ourselves and our fellow people, at will.

Here’s the main character in a piece I wrote on this theme in 2004. She usually (but not always) exists as an upload, or “ephemeral,” of generally female gender. Here she is waking up in a male body she has chosen for a particular purpose:

They woke me at 0600. Two female orderlies. I couldn’t help but notice how pretty they were as they leant over me. I groaned inwardly. It was a long time since I’d used a male body and I’d forgotten just how strong the hormonal influences were. But the effect had it uses. It dulled one’s other emotional responses and gave confidence.

“Good morning, Ephem Sol,” the orderly with the larger tits said, giving me an arch smile. I moved my eyes to her name badge with difficulty.

“Morning, Extrava Cannel,” I attempted. It came out as a croak. I cleared my throat and tried again. Getting the measure of 583’s lungs, which had a volume nearly twice as large as the female body’s, was going to take a few more conscious breaths at least. 583’s voice – my voice – was deep and resonant, I discovered on the second attempt. I was going to enjoy this. Even the task ahead seemed more of an adventure than a terror with all the adrenaline and testosterone coursing round this body stimulating my mind interfaces.”

Now, there’s nothing very original about this sort of thinking, or writing, except perhaps my errors. Later in the story this character and others download not into human bodies, but into machines. Indeed, the main character gets downloaded twice into two different machines, and then, of course, falls out with herself. And the central plot revolves around assumptions made from observing the behavior of mysterious invading “bodies.”

It is the reactions of other people that are of interest in relation to morphological freedom. “Extrava” Julia Cannel is usually not a simulated being. She is part of the community’s subculture of “extravagants” who exist in resource-heavy fleshy bodies. She is uncomfortable being flirted with by a female persona in a male body. Well…how would you react? But then she raises a point about the customs arising from body type:

“I suppose,” she said. “I always find it odd that we differentiate between male and female extravs, but not between ephems…why not say ‘ephema’ and ‘ephem’?”

Ephem Angel Sol replies:

“There’s just too many variations. You’d have to know so much about a person before you knew which to use, and even then you might be wrong some days. But you’ll be glad to know I’m firmly female insim … usually.”

Angel has been having a firmly female but unconventional sexual relationship with Extrav Timothy Arnold. While embodied in the female body she uses for that she goes by the name Angela. So her identity and form of address change again. But now, instead of a romantic engagement with Trav Arnold they are going to be working together, and because of the time pressure the male body she’s using has not quite completed the growth process. In particular it lacks any hair.

Timothy was waiting for me when I came through into the reception area. His eyebrows did a quick jig at me but then he stood up and grinned.

“Well…” he said, “well…”

“What d’you think?” I grinned back, twirling round for him to see, like a child with a new dress. He laughed, “Don’t do that! It’s too confusing as it is…Angela…” That really puzzled him. He stood there frowning at me, looking uncomfortable.

“You agreed a male body would be safer,” I said, much more seriously, using my new voice to good effect. “You’ll get used to it, don’t worry.”

Timothy crossed his arms, I did the same. He shook his head, laughing again.

“You fucking hairless wonder,” he chuckled, “Angus the Hairless Wonder.” Now he guffawed.

I stepped up to him, clapped him on the shoulder.

“OK Trav, let’s go get breakfast. What’s our assignment for the day anyway?”

“Ephem Angus-fucking-hairless-wonder Sol…” he kept muttering, shaking his head so his blond mane of hair tossed pointedly as we strode down towards the canteen.

These little fictional forays hint at how central to our ways of relating, indeed to our ways of being, our bodily forms are. How we feel about people varies with their appearance, and their physique or other powers. We assess people when we meet them – are they a threat? Could they be a mate? What do they expect of me given their threat/mate status? What signals will it send if I do this or that?

But the interesting things about morphological freedom go well beyond the etiquettes of identity. A society or political unit, or even an extended kin grouping, exists in some sense to better fulfill the needs of its members. Those needs depend on body and brain morphology. Birds do not need an air industry. But some (e.g. starlings) do engage in complex social behaviors to protect themselves against larger predators. Humans too group together to collectively tackle threats. We also build to protect our weak points. Airplanes, airports, shopping malls, apartments.

What we build, not to mention how, is dependent on our morphology. I am thinking of stairs for example. Or the vision-based sign systems in airports. Or the way we identify buses, that people must use because they are visually impaired, with a number on the front which these people cannot see .Or the intellectual complexities of the democratic political system . All of these collective institutions, expressed through products we make, are rooted in morphology. Change the morphology and what happens to the existing power structures based around the institutions?

In his 2001 Transvision paper on morphological freedom, Anders Sandberg attempts to provide a rights-based argument for a right to morphological freedom. I thoroughly recommend the paper. But it relies on a property right in one’s own body. And that opens a can of legal worms. Some of those worms crawl towards intellectual property rights in gene-related discoveries.

Other worms eat away at our flesh: If we have rights in our bodies can we then legally harm or “maim” (the name of a crime in English law for many years) ourselves? No, because this would reduce a man’s ability to fight on behalf of his country, went the old legal argument (see Robin MacKenzie on somatechnics, and the full Oxford English Dictionary). Not only are human social institutions rooted in morphology, but those institutional roots also shape individual morphology. Like tree roots pushing up a pavement, the requirements of sustaining our institutions contort our morphologies.

To propagate their power, those of high institutional status lay claims on the bodies of those they exist to protect. Sometimes some members have to give their lives so the whole institution (and those in charge) can survive. Our bodies, which are, as we are embodied beings, also our selves; our experience; are not in fact ours to do as we like with, if we wish for the protection of institutions.

Morphological freedom. Subversive. Anarchist. No doubt. But also novelty inducing, educational, stimulating, a species of freedom and a source of diversity. The importance of the freedom in morphological freedom is its ability to generate biological and cultural diversity. Compare the alternative – a mere freedom to enhance. Sure, you can change your body and brain, but only in ways which will contribute to the social institutions you presently live with, in accordance with their definitions of “enhancement”. In the long term environments change, both social and physical. Cultures homogenize, solidify and stultify. Definitions become dogmas.

Hopefully technological barriers will fall and our species’ power to protect ourselves and modify the world around us will grow. Where, then, might we find novelty, ways to understand that there are other ways to model the world, ways to learn and teach about tolerance and change? Ways to escape the aging of cultures. There remains a new frontier which we should not prematurely reject.

If technologies allow us to form and reform our morphologies at will we could try out different bodies and brains – the obviously desirable and the not-so obviously desirable – and return to the original if we wished. At least some intrepid explorers might be willing to take the risks of misery, hard work and possible failure…and who knows what they might bring the rest of us back? Their contributions would be measured in enlarged knowledge and understanding of what makes lives satisfying. And it may not always be what we expected from our C21-and-a-bit perspective. We should not preclude or discourage these voyages of discovery.

Morphological freedom cuts both ways: people may choose to enhance themselves, or to reduce their power in relation to their environment. They may choose, like ascetics of old, to reduce their sensory stimulation load, to live without a sense or two, or to take on morphologies, perhaps with others, that increase the need for interdependency. These are all potential spaces for exploration. Who knows, they may even show us ways to explore Space.

These are risky explorations. Some might turn out to be desirable and beneficial, others to be deeply problematic for the explorer and society. We cannot know in advance which are which – that’s why the exploration is worth doing – but neither should we exert pressure on people to choose one way or another.

These are options that should be available for individuals to assess and try for themselves. That way we may learn something from their choices. If many drop a sense or two and stay that way by free choice, then they must find something there of value. And if others pick up a sense or two, and choose to stay that way by free choice, then we learn we have to include both in society.

Our responsibility is to ensure that their choices are as free and unbiased as possible, and that there are some reasonable safety nets in place for foreseeable dangers. Morphological freedom then benefits from being a negative freedom in Isaiah Berlin’s sense and as Sandberg defends. It is not the sort of “freedom” that it is our responsibility to encourage and promote universally, in whose name we can justify helping others to achieve it, even where they do not yet see its benefits.

But neither should morphological freedom be hidden because of its subversive, seditious possibilities. They are the whole point.

IBM Moves Closer to Creating Computer Based on Insights from the Brain

Scientists perform cat-scale cortical simulations and map the human brain in effort to build advanced chip technology

A real-time computer-simulated cat brain? Could IBM have come up with a project more likely to trigger Internet excitement?




For the handful of you who missed the news, IBM’s Almaden Research Center announced this week that it had produced a “cortical simulation” of the scale and complexity of a cat brain. This simulation ran on one of IBM’s “Blue Gene” supercomputers, in this case at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). (An aside: LLNL is best known as the center for ongoing research into advanced nuclear weapons and related projects; if the lab is now turning its attention to brain simulations, I don’t know whether to be happy that it’s moving away from weapons or worried that it will try to weaponize AI.)

Worries about the Robopocalypse may be only partially tongue-in-cheek, but it’s worth taking a moment to examine what exactly has happened here. This is what the IBM press release says about the simulation:

Scientists, at IBM Research - Almaden, in collaboration with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses.

This isn’t a simulation of a cat brain, it’s a simulation of a brain structure that has the scale and connection complexity of a cat brain. It doesn’t include the actual structures of a cat brain, nor its actual connections; the various experiments in the project filled the memory of the cortical simulation with a bunch of data, and let the system create its own signals and connections. Put simply, it’s not an artificial (feline) intelligence, it’s a platform upon which an A(F)I could conceivably be built.

Read the rest here

Somewhere in the world, a child dies of hunger every five seconds—even though the planet has more than enough food for all.

That’s the lead from a CNN story about the scourge of global hunger. The article continues:

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon laid out this sobering statistic as he kicked off a three-day summit on world food security Monday in Rome.

“Today, more than one billion people are hungry,” he told the assembled leaders. Six million children die of hunger every year—17,000 every day, he said.

Here’s how the overwhelming scale of the problem was described in an article at GlobalPost:

According to the United Nations the number of hungry people this year reached 1.02 billion. That’s one in six human beings. Moreover, that figure has been growing each year for more than a decade, while the ravages of the global economic crisis are making matters worse in nearly every corner of the world.

So what’s the root of the problem? There are many, of course—endemic poverty, conflict, climate change, bad governance and on and on. But according to the U.N.‘s chief food honcho Jacques Diouf, the biggest factor is an economic one: under-investment in agriculture and rural development.

“If people go hungry today it is not because the world is not producing enough food but because it is not produced in the countries where 70 percent of the world’s poor live and whose livelihoods depend on farming activities,” Diouf said at a U.N. food conference in Geneva. “The challenge is not only to ensure food security for the one billion hungry people today, which is certainly an enormous task, but also to be able to feed a world population that is expected to reach 9.1 billion in 2050,” he said.

Note the key statement in the paragraph above: People go hungry today not because the world can’t produce enough food.

As we all know, plenty of food is being produced. Everyone could be fed and no one needs to go hungry or die horribly of starvation.

The problem is neither economic nor agricultural nor even demographic (too many people). It’s not for lack of technology. The problem is political. It’s politics.

We have the food and we have the capacity to distribute it fairly. What we lack is the political will to make it happen.

Is the solution to be found in emerging technologies? Hardly.

Recall the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 60s, made possible by the wholesale application of irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizers. New chemicals, processes, and machinery—emerging technologies—led to huge increases in food production worldwide. It was even thought for a time that hunger might be eradicated everywhere.

Alas, what happened was not what most people expected or hoped for. Instead of that surplus being used to dramatically reduce hunger and malnutrition, it actually ended up fueling a population explosion.

And today, with more starving people in the world than ever before—where a child dies of hunger every five seconds while, ironically, food production is at an all-time high—projections are not that we will succeed in ending starvation any time soon.

No, it seems that too much of that food will go into the stomachs of already chubby Americans:

If current obesity trends continue, more than 40 percent of adults in the United States will be obese and spending on the epidemic will quadruple to $344 billion by 2018, according to a new study. . . Since 1985 obesity levels have doubled.

What is required, then, is not that we develop miraculous new technologies to make more food. What is needed—what has always been needed—is an adjustment in human nature. More empathy. Less apathy.

Is that something that emerging technologies can provide? Or is it an ethical challenge that can only be met by looking within ourselves?

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) uses the term ‘regenerative medicine’ interchangeably with ‘tissue engineering’ and defines it as “a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field involving the life, physical and engineering sciences that seeks to develop functional cell, tissue, and organ substitutes to repair, replace or enhance biological function that has been lost due to congenital abnormalities, injury, disease, or aging.”

And researchers are doing amazing things: Gizmodo has posted videos from Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, about how lab-grown tissues are benefiting patients now.

Regenerative nanomedicine will, understandably, likely be embraced for all the promise it holds—but there have been concerns expressed about the ethical, legal, and social implications, particularity the nano part. Nanotechnology has the potential to have the greatest impact in three areas: energy, medicine, and environmental remediation. Of these three areas, nanotechnology in medicine is the most likely to be accepted by the public, starting with therapeutic treatments and then moving over to enhancements. But it does raise some interesting questions, such as can nanomedicine be considered separate and apart other nanotechnologies? And what does ‘nanotechnology’ encompass anyway? Pinning down a usable definition of nanotechnology has been harder than anticipated.

For a quick peek into some of the issues, you can check out the series of YouTube videos my colleague and I did at the Human Enhancement Conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan, earlier this year. I’m also following Gizmodo’s feature “This Cyborg Life” and am intrigued by the question, what is the enhancement that you would like to have the most? (And keep it decent, folks, comments are moderated!)

I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours…

From the war on drugs to gay marriage to file sharing, it seems like the law is in a continual, often losing, battle to keep up with the modern world.

But it’s only going to get worse from here. Advances in genetic engineering and AI are going to change what it means to be human, and that means lots and lots of work for the future’s lawyers.

Six Insane Laws We’ll Need in the Future:

• Clone Patent Laws
• Legally Redefining “Slavery”
• Rewriting the Sex Laws
• Legally Redefining “Parents”
• Genetic Discrimination Laws
• Mandatory Life Span Limits

Read all about it here