Big Issues for Humanity: Methodology Workshop
Date: 13 March 2006
Speaker(s): Professor William Bainbridge, Professor James Hughes and Professor Julian Savulescu and Dr Nick Bostrom,
Venue: Ryle Room, Philosophy Faculty, 10 Merton Street
In conjunction to the World Forum, organized by the James Martin Institute, the Future of Humanity Institute held an advanced Methodology Workshop. The Workshop focused on methodological tools and difficulties and meta-level issues that arise when thinking about the kinds of topic addressed at the World Forum, such as:
- Information markets as an institutional mechanism for aggregating information to yield probabilistic forecasts of future events or scientific hypothesis
- Observation selection theory – how to avoid anthropic bias when considering questions where observation selection effects filter our evidence, e.g. the Fermi paradox, the Doomsday argument, the Simulation argument etc.
- Disagreement and rationality. Can rational, truth-seeking Bayesians agree to disagree about factual questions? If not, what accounts for the pervasive disagreements we find among actual humans?
- Heuristics and biases. A rich literature has been developed in the last couple of decades on biases and heuristics that affect human cognition and decision-making. How do these findings relate to the prospects of human transformation and other issues arising from anticipated future technologies.
- Applied ethics and ELSI. Big government-sponsored techno-scientific projects like the human genome project and the National Nanotechnology Initiative now include substantial funding for applied ethics and other “ELSI” research. Does such research produce useful results? What impact does it have over the way technology is developed and used?
- Scenario planning – is this a useful framework for thinking about future possibilities?
- Technological determinism – to what extent is technological determinism true, and how does this influence where people of “good will” should focus their efforts?
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