James Hughes (Dr. J)
Executive Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
James Hughes, Ph.D., serves as the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, where he produces the weekly syndicated public affairs talk show Changesurfer Radio. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, and is working on a second book on neurotechnology, tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha: Using Neurotechnologies to Enhance Virtue. A bioethicist and sociologist, he teaches Health Policy at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut and holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics.
Dr. Hughes is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. He speaks on medical ethics, health care policy and future studies worldwide, and appears often on radio and television. He presented at Transvision 2006 in Helsinki Finland, in a talk entitled "Virtue Engineering," where he predicted that "contrary to the bioconservative accusation that neurological self-determination and human enhancement will encourage more selfishness in society, it will probably permit people to be even more moral and responsible than they currently are." In his presentation at Transvision 2007 in Chicago, Illinois, entitled "Cyborgs Today & in the Future," he explored some of the historical continuities between the ideals of the Enlightenment philosophes and the present-day steps toward cybernetic augmentation of the human body.
In September of 2007 he gave the closing lecture of the the Singularity Summit in San Francisco called "Waiting for the Great Leap...Forward?" There he cautioned Singularitarians not to loose sight of near-term technological issues of import, taking for instance a news item about a botnet that had managed to virally infect millions of computers. He maintained that part of the desire among Singularitarians to achieve recursive self-improvement in artificial general intelligence is based on a millennialist cognitive bias and that transhumanists need to concentrate their focus on near-term political goals to effect changes in public policy.
video
SIAI Interview Series
video
Transvision 2006,
Virtue Engineering
transcripts
Transvision 2006,
Virtue Engineering
IEET, Rights of the Person to Technological Self-Determination,
Sex Selection and Women's Reproductive Rights
Transvision 2007 partial transcript,
Cyborgs Today & in the Future
Radio Netherlands,
The State We're In
SIAI Interview Series,
Robots Entering the Workforce
2007 Singularity Summit,
Waiting for the Great Leap... Forward?
audio
Changesurfer Radio
Transvision 2003,
Transhumanist Bioethics: An Overview
Transvision 2004,
The Future of Sex
Transvision 2004,
Are Transhumanism and Religious Faith Compatible?
IEET, Rights of the Person to Technological Self-Determination,
Sex Selection and Women's Reproductive Rights
SIAI Interview Series,
Robots Entering the Workforce
Radio Netherlands,
The State We're In
2007 Singularity Summit,
Waiting for the Great Leap...Forward?
01.08.
Podcasting the Singularity, hosted by Chris Williamson