Ethics in the 21st Century: Technology and Material Limits

Is the optimisation of the human a liberation or a trap? Drawing on Bostrom, Kurzweil, Marcuse, and Latour, you will examine the transhumanist promise of overcoming biological limits and automating intelligence. You will immediately ask the harder question: is this drive for total optimisation a form of freedom, or the ultimate reduction of the human to an instrument of the economic machine? The course confronts the contradiction between the Silicon Valley dream of infinite escape and the immediate reality of planetary limits, and the politics of who gets enhanced and who does not. Future leaders will govern bio-ethics, human-machine integration, and ecological trade-offs. This course forces the question underlying all of them: what makes human life meaningful when intelligence can be automated and biology engineered?