Greenflame

Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand

Category: Ethics

  • While we’re working to insulate ourselves from pain, we’re also working to make robots feel it. Makes for some interesting ethical scenarios about both human and machine pain. An artificial nervous system aimed at teaching robots how to feel pain is being developed by German researchers. Source: Robots to be taught how to feel pain

  • With my ongoing interest in the area of bioethics and transhumanism an email mentioning this free eBook from the University of Chicago Press piqued my interest today. Will load it up on the eReader and have a skim through it. “The Longevity Seekers: Science, Business, and the Fountain of Youth” by Ted Anton. The book…

  • A really interesting article by biochemist Jennifer Doudna about how she became aware of the ethical dimensions of developing a method for genome-editing and how it affected her. Moves from just ‘doing’ science, to the need to ethical reflection as part of that – as well as the ability to communicate the implications of the…

  • Spirituality and Cancer: Christian Encounters

    I’m looking forward to the book launch next week of “Spirituality and Cancer: Christian Encounters”, edited by my friends and colleagues Caroline Blyth (University of Auckland) and Tim Meadowcroft (Laidlaw College). The book is a collection of papers delivered at a ‘Spirituality, Theology and Cancer’ Laidlaw/University of Auckland symposium held at the University of Auckland…

  • Definitely a problem we’ve run into, where a child of ours has been asked to do a school assignment based on their use of social networking, while at the same time all or most of the children in that class are too young to meet the age requirements for the service. On the one hand,…