Body Modification and Technology (Class Discussion)

Students in my “Computers, Ethics, and Society” course get to choose the topic of discussion for the last week of the semester. This semester, for the first time, my students wanted to talk about technology and body modification.

What sorts of ethical concerns arise with technology that goes into one’s body? We talked about ethical experimentation and privacy concerns. They’re concerned about how to fairly express the risks of technology when the technology is new and it’s hard to estimate how it will behave. We also talked about the roles of professionals and established institutions. To my surprise, many of them said they’d be comfortable doing hypothetical at-home body modification (inserting RFID chips for example) if they had access to evidence that the process was mostly safe. At least for minorly invasive modifications (not full surgery), they wanted evidence of the procedure’s safety but didn’t feel that formal accreditation or expert supervisors were needed.

We also talked about some exciting recent advancements - researchers in Australia recently announced a successful bionic eye that will be moving to human trials: Bionic Eye News Article