Oscar Pistorius’ New Normal

January 6, 2008 CLTS

Do oscar pistorius's prosthetic legs make him faster? that probably depends on whether you take two-leggedness as the baseline

In a few minutes, it will be midnight. I am sitting on the balcony of my rented san juan apartment. I just finished reading the IAAF report thwarting the olympic ambitions of oscar pistorius, the south african sprinter whose spirit has captured the imagination of the 24 students I am here to teach.

We started our three-week exchange seven days ago in Ottawa, where 12 of my University of Ottawa law students hosted 12 students from universidad de puerto rico. Together, these two dozen outstanding students are enrolled in a course that I call "building better humans?" (please note the question mark in the title.)

One of the goals of this interdisciplinary course is to illuminate the murky line between therapy and enhancement in a world that seems to be drifting from "natural selection" toward what bioethicist John Harris calls "deliberate selection."

What happens to people when science and technology are aggressively used to alter the human condition? What does the future hold for health and humanity as we move from Darwinian evolution to self-directed enhancement medicine?

Minding The Machines

May 4, 2007 CLTS

Amid all the hype about south korea's proposed robot charter, let's not forget the more important question of whether robots should assume human roles in the first place

A few months ago, as part of its bid to put a robot in every household by 2020, the south korean ministry of commerce, industry and energy announced its intention "to draw up an ethical guideline for the producers and users of robots as well as the robots themselves ..." Responsible computer programming, corporate accountability and consumer protection in the electronics sector -- these are all good things.

Pause. Rewind. Replay. What? An ethical guideline for the robots themselves?

Look out: The eyes have it

January 12, 2004 CLTS

This article was first published in the Globe and Mail on January 12, 2004. The published article can be read here.

When Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published their landmark Harvard Law Review article "The Right to Privacy" in 1890, they talked about privacy as "the right to be let alone."

At that time, they were responding to the arrival of the camera in society. They could not have imagined the challenges to privacy that exist in the wired (and soon-to-be-wireless) world that we live in today. For example, how are our rights affected when cameras or computer chips are implanted into our bodies? Who are we, actually? Where do "we" end, and the machines begin?

Will Technology Kill Anonymity

December 11, 2003 CLTS

This article was written by Kate Heartfield and can be downloaded here.

Age of surveillance goes under the scope

September 15, 2003 CLTS

A true surveillance society can now be achieved, anywhere in the modern industrial world, if that is what the population or leadership wants.

That sounds like something George Orwell might have said in one of his more paranoid moments. But I’m afraid those words come from someone who’s a lot closer to us, both in space and time.

Indeed, the words aren’t from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but from 1999, and the writer wasn’t George Orwell, but David Flaherty, the former B.C. information and privacy commissioner. Mr. Flaherty’s words accurately captured the state of information technology in 1999; four years later, the threat of a surveillance society is greater than ever.