When Hippocrates Met Kurzweil: Questions for Human Dignity in the 21st Century

The following lecture by Nigel M. de S. Cameron, PhD, MBA was originally presented at 2015 Summer conference "Science, Research, and the Limits of Bioethics." The enduring legacy of Hippocrates lies in his establishment of medicine as both a scientific and a human enterprise, the foundation not merely for medical practice but the core cultural notion of a profession—an effort founded on both skill and values, with accountability for both baked into the community of those thus committed. The development of “bioethics” in the mid-20th century marked the fraying of both the substantive commitments of the tradition and the professional idea itself—bioethics both as a multi-disciplinary effort to manage growing disagreement, in some cases by re-affirming the substance of the tradition, more generally to assert the “human” character of the enterprise whatever particular values might be brought to it. The attempt of bioethics to bridge into public policy has proved generally ineffective and, despite modest successes, in part counter-productive. As emerging technologies supplant traditional questions at the science/tech/human interface it is plain that we need new models of understanding if we are concerned to affirm the centrality of human dignity, not simply for the 21st century but for, say, the 31st. The exponential character of technological change has only begun to re-shape the conditions for human experience.