Ethics and Human Enhancement Technologies: Preparing for a new future

This talk will address an important research issue that figures in the work of the Unit for Bioethics, situated in the Centre for Applied Ethics at Stellenbosch University. The author will deal with the question: Do the technological developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) justify us to acknowledge new forms of ethics or a radical rethinking of the nature of what we currently regard as ethics? This question is approached and discussed within the ambit of an overarching perspective in terms of which, we could frame the phenomenon of the 4IR, and which provides enough access to the problematic to enable us to make a few provisional remarks about the topic under discussion. This overarching perspective is the possibility and phenomenon of radical biomedical human enhancement, with the eventual prospect of the emergence of a new (post-) human species. Attention is in this respect paid to aspects such as Kurzweil’s apocalyptic, differences between robots and humans, the question and possibility of unlimited longevity, the relationship between normal and radically enhanced individuals, a moral heuristic for the slowness of nature, and the question whether human nature as such is something we ought to preserve at all cost. Some of these themes will receive attention in the talk.