Abstract: Technoprogressivism is a strain of political thought that has manifested in many ways over the last 250 years. Technoprogressives are those who combine egalitarianism, liberal rights, and techno-optimism. Historically the technologies that technoprogressives have proposed as liberatory have ranged from industrial automation and rural electrification to contraception and artificial…

James J. Hughes Abstract: Most debates over the politics of enhancement are ahistorical, assuming wrongly that enhancement and its consequences are imminent dilemmas rather than a part of the human condition since we became human. We have used technologies to extend our health and longevity, control our reproduction, and enrich…

A seminar on military AI ethics this weekend focuses on the many ethical and regulatory issues emerging as AI is embedded in the battlefield and in soldiers’ bodies and brains Our colleagues in Philosophy at UMass Lowell have a project funded by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force…

by J. Hughes Published by Chicago DSA, 1991 — — — — — — — — In 1991 I was 30, and working on my doctorate in Sociology at the University of Chicago. UChicago DSA had just led a coalition of progressive student groups — the “Alternative List” — in…

J. Hughes Published by the IEET 2015–02–14 From Moral Intuition to Moral Reasoning Just as we have ancient neural architectures for bonding with our fellow mammals, we also appear to have evolved deeply-wired neural intuitions about fairness and morality. One of our deeply ingrained moral intuitions is that it is…

J. Hughes Published by the IEET on 2014–09–22 There are a number of promising brain-machines interfaces for boosting intelligence. Neurofeedback Consumer EEG neurofeedback tools, such as the Muse, Melon and iFocusBand tools released this year, are now quite affordable. They allow the monitoring and, theoretically, entrainment of states of focus…

J. Hughes Published by the IEET on 2014–09–10 Social Change for Cognitive Enhancement Flynn Effect While there are powerful genetic constraints on our intellectual abilities we know that there are many environmental and behavioral factors that can encourage and discourage the development of intellectual abilities. For instance we know that…

J. Hughes Published by the IEET on 2014–09–05 Wisdom and the Intellectual Virtues In this project I have avoided use of the term “wisdom.” There are psychological instruments that attempt to measure wisdom, but not very coherently. They ask respondents to answer questions about themselves that tap lots of different…

J. Hughes Published by the IEET on 2014–08–19 I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder in the first grade, and my son was diagnosed in kindergarten. When I was diagnosed in 1967 ADD was called hyperactivity-hyperkinetivity disorder, and it was still a pretty new idea. I had been getting into…