SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 2025 : 1 pm EST The Foundation for Bioethics in Technology’s year-end, public meeting (formerly set for Saturday, Dec 28, 2024) featuring BLOOMBERG TV’s documentary series Posthuman.
PLEASE RSVP to director@bioethics.tech and a link to access the online meeting will be sent to you.
“Technology that once seemed like science fiction is rapidly becoming reality. In this four-part series, Emily Chang unravels the future of being human in an age of unprecedented innovation.”
SOURCE : Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2024-10-29/posthuman-trailer October 29th, 2024
FULL SERIES LINKS : https://www.bloomberg.com/originals/series/posthuman
RELATED : https://bioethics.tech/machines-of-loving-grace/
RELATED : for discussion at meeting – relevant portion of ‘Fit For Purpose’ by DOOMBERG, https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/fit-for-purpose December 26, 2024:
“The field of cybernetics involves the study of relationships in information—how it is processed, regulated, and used to achieve specific outcomes in complex systems, including living organisms, bureaucracies, and computer programs. As contributors to the broader science of nonlinear dynamics, cyberneticians play a formative role in the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. Insights from the field are also widely deployed in corporate development programs for executive leaders, as managing large global teams is nothing if not an exercise in taming the forces of chaos.
Among the most famous practitioners of cybernetics was the British theorist and consultant Stafford Beer, author of the classic book Brain of the Firm. Beer popularized the concept of POSIWID (“the purpose of a system is what it does”), a profoundly clarifying insight that has formed the foundation of many a brainstorming session. As Beer correctly pointed out, if a system constantly fails to achieve its stated purpose, then its purpose is an unstated one, no matter how often politicians or business leaders insist otherwise.
Examples abound. The purpose of campaign donations is to buy politicians. The purpose of rebate application forms is to frustrate claimants. The purpose of forever wars is to enrich defense contractors. Cynical as these statements may sound, each is a superior fit to reality than altruistically supporting a cause, following through on promised rewards, or spreading democracy to far-flung places few citizens in the West care much about, respectively.
Once sufficiently trained in the POSIWID framework, reading the news becomes a rather more edifying experience of discovering the true purpose obfuscated behind specious façades.”
