Sentient Developments points to a special report in IEEE Spectrum on the current state of prosthetic arms. See IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: Prosthetic Arms with video here.

I’ve been wondering whether South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who runs with carbon-fibre prosthetic legs, would be competing at the Beijing Olympics ever since I saw a news article about him a year to eighteen months ago. It appears now that he won’t be there, even if he makes the qualifying times.

See: Pistorius’s unfair advantage keeps him out of Olympics | Athletics | Guardian Unlimited Sport

Hat tip to Andii over at Nouslife: Pistorius’s unfair advantage -the cyborg prosthete.

It’s an interesting question – how much enhancement should an athlete be allowed? Obviously, things like spectacles and contact lenses are allowed, as are various operations to fix/improve weak spots in a physique (e.g. replacing broken tendons) or corrective eye surgery. But something like taking performance-enhancing drugs or blood-doping isn’t. It seems like it’s going to get harder to differentiate between therapy/enhancement in sport as time goes on.

NPR ran a programme on Pistorius and enhancement in sport back in May last year. You can listen to it at: NPR : Prosthetics in Sports: Disability or Advantage?

The article Wired: The World’s Most Advanced Bionic Arm précises the work being done to create “an artificial human arm that acts, looks and feels to its user like his native arm, and to do it with astonishing speed by the end of 2009”.

I can hear the Six Million Dollar Man theme music in my head as I’m reading it.

Firstly, a (mini) colloquium on Media and Religious Authority on Tuesday, which included some of the Virtual Theology colloquium participants from a while back, along with Heidi Campbell. A good time to catch up with people, to meet Heidi in person for the first time, and to start to thrash out some ideas I’m interested in relating to various dimensions of religious authority in comic book and graphic novel genres.

More about it at:

• SansBlogue: Media and Religious Authority
• fishers, surfers and casters » Virtual Theology Colloquium
• When Religion Meets New Media: Media and Religious Authority Colloquium

Then Friday and Saturday I participated in the Metanexus/Tyndale-Carey sponsored conference New Perspectives in Science and Theology. Heidi (The Technologized Other: Considering the Posthuman and Prophetic Technorealism) and I (Image-bearing cyborgs?) were the opening speakers on Friday, and I got some good questions and comments after my talk (and over the weekend) that will help to shape a few areas that need tighter definition and reflection. And gave me some ideas for at least one other paper to write.

And that’s what I like about presenting at things like the two events this week. It gives you a chance to start a conversation about your work, and to make connections to other work that you haven’t made before. Doesn’t always make answering the questions being asked any easier though

Books on the go at the moment.

Writing at the Edge of the Universe

Published by Canterbury University Press (2003), it’s a collection of essays, interviews, reflections and talks from the ‘Creative Writing in New Zealand’ Conference. Covers everything from politics, young adults fiction, comics, hypertext, and definitions of ‘cultural’ within the NZ writing scene. Something to dip into every now and then.

Spin Control by Chris Moriarty

A mix of technology, religion and politics set in a posthuman future. Has a short bibliography of material relating to emergence, transhumanism, and social evolutionism. Oh, and lots of stuff about ants. If only my thesis read as well.

The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card

Finally got around to reading this collection of Card’s older science fiction material. Some interesting material relating to theodicy, suffering, pain, human perseverance, and free will, together with other observations about the technological quest for immortality.

For Everyone Concerned by Damien Wilkins (2007)

The most recent collection of short works by Wilkins, much of which is set in Wellington. I grabbed the library’s copy and found it a mixed bag (as with most collections like this). I loved the short story “Reunion” set in Wellington Library though.

New Perspectives In Science and Theology Conference will be held 27-28 July 2007 at the Bible College of New Zealand in Auckland. It’s being organized by TANSAA (Theology and the Natural Sciences in Aotearoa Auckland) and Tyndale-Carey Graduate School, and is a Metanexus initiative.

The conference speakers cover a range of specialties: Physics & Origins of life; Biology; Theology & Biblical Studies; Psychology; Media and Digital Technologies.

I’m presenting a paper entitled “Image-bearing cyborgs?”, picking up some of the strands of hacking, hybridity and hope.

Click on the poster for more details.

A lot gets written about the ultra-hi-tech prosthetics (Greenflame · The World’s First Powered Ankle) and ‘cyborg’-implants (Greenflame · Mind Over Matter) but this (relatively) low-tech approach to finger replacements looks interesting. See: Gadget Lab – Mechanical Fingers Grant Grip: No Batteries Needed.

In another of those areas where traditional boundaries become contested, scientists are working on developing a synthetic blood substitute for medical emergencies. (BBC NEWS | UK | England | North Yorkshire | Scientists create ‘plastic’ blood)

I wonder how this ‘blood’ will be considered by those communities that attach a special significance to human blood.

Technology Review: The World’s First Powered Ankle has an article on a new prosthetic ankle that functions in such a way as to add energy to walking, helping to reduce the effort required to use the prosthesis.

See also: MIT’s Robo Sapiens page and Greenflame » Robot avatars and other such things.

A while back Lindsay over at Random Murmurings pointed me towards the podcast of the ABC’s “All in the Mind” radio programme, and in particular this episode, All in the Mind – The Brain Computer Interface (2 December 2006). The episode looks at how technological developments, particularly in digital implants, might aid those with motor neurone disease and similar conditions.

The episode is especially interesting because includes excerpts from the paper co-authored by Nicholas Chisholm about his experience of locked-in syndrome and his observations on medical decision making and ethics from a position of complete lack of voice and power. It makes for very scary reading. The full text of the paper, co-authored with Grant Gillett of the Otago Bioethics Centre in Dunedin, is available at: The patient’s journey: Living with locked-in syndrome — Chisholm and Gillett 331 (7508): 94 — BMJ.

The issues presented connect closely those also raised by Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell in several of their publications where they argue that those who are being “helped” by technology are left out of the consultative loop, and become merely tools used by those promoting the technology. They also note that ethical guidelines are also often determined by those with little or no personal experience of the issues being faced, and again those with that experience are not consulted. See:

• Goggin, G. and C. Newell (2002). Digital disability: the social construction of disability in new media. Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield. (Link)
• Goggin, G. and C. Newell (2004). “Uniting the nation? Disability, stem cells, and the Australian media.” Disability & Society 19(1): 47-60. (Link)
• Newell, C. (2006). “Disability, Bioethics, and Rejected Knowledge.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31(3): 269-283. (Link)
• News in Science – More support for sex selection – 16/10/2001
• Thanks, but I’d rather be disabled by Marilyn Head | New Zealand Listener (January 21-27 2006 Vol 202 No 3428).

Michael Spezio (neuroscientist and Presbyterian minister) is another voice who is concerned that the optimism articulated by transhumanists and techno-progressives about solving issues of disease technologically with brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) fails to take into account those who are being “helped”. (Spezio, M. L. (2005). “Brain and Machine: Minding the Transhuman Future.” Dialog 44(4): 375-380. (Link))

In the BMI world, conversations proceed, press releases go out, stock losses are assessed, all without noticing the very real presence of humans in our midst who have taken our species’ first steps into BMI. Both advocates and opponents appear to already know the outcome of BMI, and in these imagined knowledge scapes, the research participants who are the true BMI explorers remain blurry figures, faceless and voiceless and powerless to make any contribution. (379)

He notes that,

While the questions are necessary, the form of speculative minding used to sketch possible answers serves largely to obscure rather than clarify the true benefits and harms likely to result from any recommended policy. Remaining wholly or mainly in imagined relation to imagined individuals with BMI means treating such individuals always as distant third persons, really as manipulable objects of one’s own story. No matter how strongly one professes concern for a person or group of people, if that concern emerges from and is elicited by wholly one-sided constructions of those people, the chauvinism of such one-sidedness will always overshadow the concern. (378)

Reducing things to “issues” or “problems” to be solved distances us from recognizing the flesh and blood human beings involved – “others” who have let become things rather than persons.