Why sex robots should fear us Nicholas Agar, Pablo García-Barranquero Governing the Future Digitalization Artificial Intelligence Dataism, 2025
How Going to Space Changes the Debate About Radical Human Enhancement Nicholas Agar Bioethics, 2025 This paper predicts that humans will venture into space and that, to survive and thrive in space, we will need to enhance our capacities radically. Moderate enhancement is insufficient for a humanity that commits to a future in Space. The paper is a partial retraction of the author's claims about the morality and prudential rationality of radical human enhancement. It allows that radical enhancement may be imprudent and immoral for Earth‐bound humans, but essential for humans who settle in space. The paper advances a conjecture about how to assess which kinds of radical enhancements are required and which should be rejected. A humanity that commits to a future in Space may make progress on some disputes that today seem intractable.
Dialogues on Human Enhancement: An Interview with Nicholas Agar* Murilo Mariano Vilaça, Murilo Karasinski, Léo Peruzzo Júnior, Nicholas Agar Revista De Filosofia Aurora, 2024 In this interview, philosopher Nicholas Agar answers questions about his most recent book, Dialogues on Human Enhancement. Agar comments on the challenge of writing a book in dialogue form, what the process was like involving his students, and the relevance of using an ancient method of doing philosophy. In addition to genetic technologies, Agar discusses digital technologies and brain-machine interface technologies (BCIs). He also reflects on what it means to be human in today’s technological society.
Can 'eugenics' be defended? Walter Veit, Jonathan Anomaly, Nicholas Agar, Peter Singer, Diana S. Fleischman, et al. Monash Bioethics Review, 2021 In recent years, bioethical discourse around the topic of ‘genetic enhancement’ has become increasingly politicized. We fear there is too much focus on the semantic question of whether we should call particular practices and emerging bio-technologies such as CRISPR ‘eugenics’, rather than the more important question of how we should view them from the perspective of ethics and policy. Here, we address the question of whether ‘eugenics’ can be defended and how proponents and critics of enhancement should engage with each other.
How to Treat Machines that Might Have Minds Nicholas Agar Philosophy and Technology, 2020 This paper offers practical advice about how to interact with machines that we have reason to believe could have minds. I argue that we should approach these interactions by assigning credences to judgements about whether the machines in question can think. We should treat the premises of philosophical arguments about whether these machines can think as offering evidence that may increase or reduce these credences. I describe two cases in which you should refrain from doing as your favored philosophical view about thinking machines suggests. Even if you believe that machines are mindless, you should acknowledge that treating them as if they are mindless risks wronging them. Suppose your considered philosophical view that a machine has a mind leads you to consider dating it. You may have reason to regret that decision should these dates lead on to a life-long relationship with a mindless machine. In the paper’s final section, I suggest that building a machine that is capable of performing all intelligent human behavior should produce a general increase in confidence that machines can think. Any reasonable judge should count this feat as evidence in favor of machines having minds. This rational nudge could lead to broad acceptance of the idea that machines can think.
