Quote:
Originally Posted by Phanuthier
Ok I'll play ball with you. A recent conference I was at, one the panal discussions was on the ethics of microfluedics. The idea behind this nanotechnology was the implementation Moore's Law'ing down medical devices so that end customer could do in vivo testing at the palm of their hand for a penny a pop. This varies from the precision of low noise, high linearity signal precision circuits, to their I/O interface, sensors, their performance over temperature and how well process variations would be over a streamlined performance such as TSMC. Typically, it can be associated that low noise circuits are low power, sans the biasing circuitry which may depend on how you much you want to mitigate the low frequency noise (i.e. flickr noise) or offset. Off coarse, to get these precisions, you may need mixed-signal circuits such as PLL's and so forth. This could have huge environmental issues involved. The primary research, as I said, is Moore's Law'ing down these into a streamlined process such as one offered by TSMC. For 45 minutes, the ethics were discussed in great detail.
You go. What are your thoughts?
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Well, let's take this to a healthy level. I am not a computer or software engineer although I am vaguely familiar with Moore's Law as a perpetual problem in computer circuitry.
In fact, this is an interesting case study for what I was saying. The parlay and discussion of ethics in science is almost exclusively now the domain of scientists. Look at your post, you used industry and field specific language with no indication of what the ethics might be to an average person or a specialist in a different field. It's just indicated that we should trust the experts instead of appealing to the empiricism of the greater polity.
So my thoughts would be... so what? Maybe I am totally anachronistic and science/technology is simply too complicated for the average person to understand. Maybe what Aristotle said about science being only what we can know with our senses is out of date? Judging from what little I know about quantum physics, that's probably entirely true, but instead of accepting that these questions are only for the domain of scientific ethics, we either need to broaden the definition of science ethics to include contribution from the humanities (mainly philosophy and literature) or we need to start educating people on scientific issues so they are better able to answer these questions for themselves without relying on elite opinion.
Is that a fair response?