In Whose Image? Remaking Humanity through Cybernetics and Nanotechnology
نویسنده
چکیده
Though the controversies surrounding human cloning and stem cell research have recently captured the public's attention, the less well-known technologies of cybernetics and nanotechnology are equally worthy of focus in that they have the potential to transform the way we think about human beings. Unfortunately, our conceptions of cybernetics have largely been formed by Hollywood and have thus been dismissed as mere science fiction, while most of us have heard little to nothing about nanotechnology. The goals of this essay are therefore to provide an overview of cybernetics and nanotechnology, to consider the current state of development of these fields, and to explore some of the ethical issues that these technologies will surely raise.
منابع مشابه
Nanotechnology Challenges: Introduction
INTRODUCTION Nanotechnology is a recently emerging and rapidly growing field whose dynamics and prospects pose many great challenges not only to scientists and engineers but also to society at large. Since forecasts of nanotech-nology range from the next industrial revolution to severe threats to humanity , nanotechnology has already created enormous social disturbance. While the promises of na...
متن کاملPerceptually stable regions for arbitrary polygons
Zou and Yan have recently developed a skeletonization algorithm of digital shapes based on a regularity/singularity analysis; they use the polygon whose vertices are the boundary pixels of the image to compute a constrained Delaunay triangulation (CDT) in order to find local symmetries and stable regions. Their method has produced good results but it is slow since its complexity depends on the ...
متن کاملHistogram-based fuzzy filter for image restoration
In this paper, we present a novel approach to the restoration of noise-corrupted image, which is particularly effective at removing highly impulsive noise while preserving image details. This is accomplished through a fuzzy smoothing filter constructed from a set of fuzzy membership functions for which the initial parameters are derived in accordance with input histogram. A principle of conserv...
متن کاملProbabilistic winner-take-all segmentation of images with application to ship detection
A recent neural clustering scheme called "probabilistic winner-take-all (PWTA)" is applied to image segmentation. It is demonstrated that PWTA avoids underutilization of clusters by adapting the form of the cluster-conditional probability density function as clustering proceeds. A modification to PWTA is introduced so as to explicitly utilize the spatial continuity of image regions and thus imp...
متن کاملMedia Cybernetics White Paper Spherical Aberration
I n t roduc t ion Digital photomicrographers assume that lens aberrations are corrected by the microscope manufacturer and that their instruments are designed for best performance. However, this belief is unwarranted if the specimen is mounted in a medium inappropriate for the objective lens. It is easy to forget that the refractive medium between specimen and objective is critical for maintain...
متن کامل