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Body altering tech set to change the workplace
Stone age humans began using lethal technology 71,000 yrs ago Trends Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE |
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Body altering tech set to change the workplace RETINAL implants to help pilots see at night, stimulant drugs to keep surgeons alert and steady handed, cognitive enhancers to focus the minds of executives for a big speech or presentation. Medical and scientific advances are bringing human enhancements into work but with them, according to a report by British experts, come not only the potential to help society and boost productivity, but also a range of ethical dilemmas. “We’re not talking science fiction here, we’re talking about advances that could impact significantly on the way we work... in the near future,” said Genevra Richardson, a professor of law at Kings College London and one of the authors of the report. The report was published after a joint workshop involving four major British scientific institutions which looked at emerging technologies like cognitive enhancing drugs, bionic limbs and retinal implants that have the potential to change workplaces dramatically in future. Richardson said while such developments may benefit society in important ways, such as by boosting workforce productivity, their use also had “significant policy implications” to be considered by governments, employers, workers and trades unions. “There are a range of technologies in development and in some cases already in use that have the potential to transform our workplaces — for better or for worse,” she said. Human physical and cognitive enhancements are primarily developed with sick or disabled people in mind, as medicines or therapies to help them overcome mental or physical disorders. But experts say drugs and other forms of enhancement are being used increasingly by healthy people who want to benefit from the boost they can give to performance. Barbara Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at Cambridge University who contributed to the report, said, for example, that modafinil, a generic drug prescribed for sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, is often used by academics or business leaders travelling to conferences who need to be at the top of their game when delivering a speech. “They take (sleep) medications on the plane to fall asleep, and take modafinil to wake up when they get there,” she said. Other stimulants such as Novartis’s Ritalin and Shire’s Adderall, prescribed for conditions like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, are also used by healthy people to increase focus. One issue with this kind of use is the lack of long-term safety studies of such drugs in healthy people, the experts said, so there may be unknown risks ahead. Other problems include whether cognitive enhancers are fair. Is it cheating to go into a job interview or exam having taken a drug to boost your mental focus? Research from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the United States has estimated that up to 16 per cent of students in America also use cognitive enhancers to improve performance in exams or for particular essays or projects. The report also pointed to visual enhancement technologies, such as retinal implants, that could be used by the military, by night watchmen, safety inspectors or gamekeepers. Technologies to enhance night vision or extend of the range of human vision to include other wavelengths such as ultra-violet light could become a reality relatively soon, it said. Sahakian suggested that for drivers or pilots, such enhancements could reduce fatigue and lower the risk of fatal accidents. But she also raised the question of whether employers keen to squeeze more productivity out of a workforce might coerce workers into using enhancements against their will. “Imagine you’re a bus driver bringing children back on a journey to the UK overnight and your boss says you have to take cognitive-enhancing drug because there are risks to the children if you don’t stay awake. Is that acceptable?” she said. “These are the kinds of things we have to grapple with.” — Reuters
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Stone age humans began using lethal technology 71,000 yrs ago THE date when stone age humans first invented the lethal technology of spears and arrows has been set back many thousands of years with the discovery of small stone blades dating to 71,000 years ago. Archaeologists believe the “bladelets” were used as the sharp tips for arrows or spears and were made by a relatively sophisticated technique involving the heat treatment of stone before shaping the final cutting edges. The fine stone blades were excavated from a prehistoric site called Pinnacle Point on the southern coast of South Africa and are between 6,000 and 11,000 years older than the previous oldest known samples of spear and arrow blades, scientists said. The discovery suggests that the invention of lethal projectile weapons came far earlier in the course of human prehistory than previously realised and that, once invented, the knowledge was passed down the generations, according to a study in Nature led by Curtis Marean of Arizona State University. Previously, scholars thought that the technology of “projectile weapons” was first invented about 60,000 years ago and then lost for many thousands of years before being reinvented between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago. “Every time we excavate a new site in coastal South Africa with advanced field techniques, we discover new and surprising results that push back in time the evidence for uniquely human behaviours,” Dr Marean said. Arrows and spears were probably the key weapons that allowed anatomically modern Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa and successfully colonise other parts of the world, including Europe where the Neanderthals lived, he said. “When Africans left Africa and entered Neanderthal territory they had projectiles with greater killing reach and these early moderns probably also had higher levels of hyper-cooperative behaviour,” he said. “These two traits were a knockout punch. Combine them, as modern humans did and still do, and no prey or competitor is safe. This probably laid the foundation for the expansion out of Africa of modern humans and the extinction of many prey as well as our sister species such as Neanderthals.”
— The Independent
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Trends SALMON, Idaho: An Idaho scientist shrugging off skeptical fellow scholars in his quest for evidence of Bigfoot has turned his sights skyward, with plans to float a blimp over the US mountain West in search of the mythic, ape-like creature. Idaho State University has approved the unusual proposal of faculty member Jeffrey Meldrum, an anatomy and anthropology professor ridiculed by some peers for past research of a being whose existence is widely disputed by mainstream science. Heartbeat, not battery, could power pacemakers LOS ANGELES: Your own beating heart may generate enough electricity to power a heart-regulating pacemaker, ending the need for expensive surgeries to replace expiring batteries, according to an early study of an experimental energy-converting device. Researchers at the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor tested an energy-harvesting device that runs on piezoelectricity — the electrical charge generated from motion, according to the study which was released at the annual American Heart Association scientific conference. — Reuters
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THIS UNIVERSE Why does the night sky appear dark? Sky is nothing but the light scattered by the atmosphere. At night there is no light passing through the atmosphere. Hence there is nothing to scatter. Therefore, there is no light coming from the atmosphere or anything else. That is why it is dark at night. That is why the night sky is dark. That is why there is no sky at night! How does frost build up in refrigerators? The refrigerator door has to be opened some time. When that happens some outside air is bound to enter. The outside air usually has humidity higher than the cold air in the refrigerator. Mixing of the inner and the outer air, therefore, leads to condensation of moisture. This builds up on the cold surface of the cold cooling surface of the refrigerator, where it deposits as frost. This goes on as time passes, and the refrigerator is opened frequently. Ultimately, we end up with thick layers of frost in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. Was the Big Bang the conversion of quantum information into matter and anti-matter? Quite possibly, yes!
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RETINAL implants to help pilots see at night, stimulant drugs to keep surgeons alert and steady handed, cognitive enhancers to focus the minds of executives for a big speech or presentation.
Medical and scientific advances are bringing human enhancements into work but with them, according to a report by British experts, come not only the potential to help society and boost productivity, but also a range of ethical dilemmas.
