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?
Read moreAmid 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?
Read moreWay back, on April 9th 2005, I attended one of Peter Yu’s many excellent conferences: “W(h)ither the Middleman?”
It was a fun event, packed with many of cyberlaw’s rockstars.
I was on the last panel of day two, looking at ‘the future of intermediaries’ along with a great line-up that included Ann Bartow, Rob Heverly, Dan Hunter and David Post.
For me, the most inspiring of the talks during the two day event was the one given by Ann. She took the question posed in the conference title seriously, choosing to remove the bracketed-h and explaining why gender equality requires us to wither the ‘man’ in the middle. The publication deriving from this talk is available here, and I highly recommend it as an important diagnostic and prescription for the way we use (and don’t use) the web.
Read moreIn what could almost be described as an existential crisis, I have been asking myself why/whether to host a personal website for exactly the same amount of time that i have been sitting on iankerr.ca. I registered the site right around the first bong of the new millennium; it has taken me six years to execute. When I bought the domain, I had no clue why or what I would use it for. I confess that I mostly did it so that no one else would cybersquat.
Read moreThis 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?
Read moreThis article was written by Kate Heartfield and can be downloaded here.
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