Editor | Ari Schulman |
---|---|
Frequency | Quarterly |
Publisher | The Center for the Study of Technology and Society, The Ethics and Public Policy Center |
Founded | 2003 |
Based in | Washington, D.C. |
Language | English |
Website | The New Atlantis |
ISSN | 1543-1215 (print) 1555-5569 (web) |
OCLC | 56518547 |
The New Atlantis is a journal founded by the social conservative advocacy group the Ethics and Public Policy Center, now published by the Center for the Study of Technology and Society. [1] It covers topics about the social, ethical, political, and policy dimensions of modern science and technology. [2] The journal is editorially reviewed, however is not peer-reviewed on scientific topics. [3] It is edited by Ari Schulman, having previously been edited by co-founders Eric Cohen and Adam Keiper.
The journal's name is taken from Francis Bacon's utopian novella New Atlantis , which the journal's editors describe as a "fable of a society living with the benefits and challenges of advanced science and technology." [4] An editorial in the inaugural issue states that the aim of the journal is "to help us avoid the extremes of euphoria and despair that new technologies too often arouse; and to help us judge when mobilizing our technological prowess is sensible or necessary, and when the preservation of things that count requires limiting the kinds of technological power that would lessen, cheapen, or ultimately destroy us." [5] Writing for National Review , editor Adam Keiper described The New Atlantis as being written from a "particularly American and conservative way of thinking about both the blessings and the burdens of modern science and technology." [6] New Atlantis authors and bioethicists publishing in other journals have also similarly referred to The New Atlantis as being written from a social conservative stance which utilizes religion. [7] [8] [9] [10]
The New Atlantis tends to publish views in favor of technological innovation but wary of certain avenues of development. For example, the journal has generally advocated nuclear energy; [11] space exploration and development through public–private partnerships, [12] including crewed missions to Mars; [13] biofuels; [14] and genetically modified foods. [15] But it has expressed ambivalent or critical views about developments in synthetic biology [16] and military technologies like drones, [17] [18] chemical weapons, [19] and cyberwarfare. [20] Articles often explore policy questions on these and other issues, sometimes advocating particular policy outcomes, especially on health care, [21] environmental management, [22] and energy. [23]
The journal has published widely on bioethics, including issues such as stem cell research, [24] assisted reproduction, [25] cloning, [26] assisted suicide, [27] organ and tissue donation, [28] the purported link between vaccines and autism, [29] and informed consent. [30] Articles on these issues often highlight the potential for dangerous or degrading developments, including concerns over human dignity, [31] with many articles examining human enhancement, [32] and life extension, [33] and historical precedents for abuse in eugenics [34] and population control. [35]
The journal also features broader philosophical reflections on science and technology, and tends to be skeptical of what its authors consider to be speculative overreach common in popular discussions. Examples include articles that have defended the existence of free will in light of developments in neuroscience, [36] questioned the wisdom of using brain scans in courtrooms, [37] and described how growing knowledge of epigenetics has undermined common claims about genetic determinism. [38] While the journal has sometimes aired libertarian views about human enhancement and transhumanism, [39] its contributors generally tend to question whether technologies like artificial intelligence, [40] friendly artificial intelligence, [41] and genetic enhancement [32] [42] are possible or desirable.
The journal has also published widely on the interpersonal effects of the Internet and digital technology. It has featured articles on subjects like Facebook, [43] [44] [45] [46] cell phones, [47] multitasking, [48] e-readers, [49] GPS and navigation, [50] and virtual reality. [51] A 2006 article by Matthew B. Crawford advocating the intellectual and economic virtues of the manual trades [52] was noted as a best-of-the-year essay by New York Times columnist David Brooks, [53] and was subsequently expanded into the bestselling [54] book Shop Class as Soulcraft. [55] The journal also frequently publishes essays on philosophical and literary questions relating to science and technology. [56] [57] [58]
In August 2016, Paul R. McHugh, at the time a retired professor, [59] co-authored a 143-page review of the scientific literature on gender and sexuality in The New Atlantis. [59] [60] In September 2016, Johns Hopkins University faculty members Chris Beyrer, Robert W. Blum, and Tonia C. Poteat wrote a Baltimore Sun op-ed, to which six other Johns Hopkins faculty members also contributed, in which they indicated concerns about McHugh's co-authored report, which they said mischaracterized the current state of science on gender and sexuality. [61] [62] More than 600 alumni, faculty members and students at the medical school also signed a petition calling on the university and hospital to disavow the paper. "These are dated, now-discredited theories," said Chris Beyrer, a professor at the public health school and part of the faculty group that denounced McHugh's stance. [63] [64] [65] Brynn Tannehill, a board member of the Transgender United Fund wrote that "this isn't a study, it's a very long Opinion-Editorial piece." [66]
Writing for the National Review in a 2003 column, the conservative author Stanley Kurtz described The New Atlantis as influential on thinking about science and technology. [67] [68]
Richard John Neuhaus, former editor of the conservative journal First Things , wrote that The New Atlantis is "as good a publication as there is for the intelligent exploration of questions in bioethics and projections—promising, ominous, and fantastical—about the human future," [69] and a writer in The American Conservative described the journal as a source "of fresh ideas on the Right." [70] National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg described The New Atlantis as "a new and interesting magazine" that "seems to be trying to carve out the space for the government to stop the more offensive aspects of biotechnology." [71]
By contrast, the liberal bioethicist Jonathan D. Moreno has said that the journal offers "a very dark vision" about science and technology, but that it "makes an important point about the need to worry about the ends as well as means in science" [72] and that its "writers were young, smart, and had a good understanding of the political process and the making of public policy." [9] Bioethicist Ruth Macklin criticized The New Atlantis as representative of a conservative movement in bioethics that is "mean-spirited, mystical, and emotional" and that "claims insight into ultimate truth yet disavows reason." [10]
The journal has particularly gained a reputation among the transhumanist movement for its criticism of human enhancement. James Hughes, a techno-progressivist and at times director of organizations such as the World Transhumanist Association and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, notes that the journal "has published influential attacks on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, reproductive technology, and life extension." The artist and designer, Natasha Vita-More, wife of British transhumanist philosopher, author, and cryonicist Max More, has described it as a "journal known as a ring of bioconservatives bent on opposing the cyberculture." Meanwhile, the organization founded by her husband, the Extropy Institute, has called it "a high-powered rallying point for the neo-Luddites." [73]
The New Atlantis also publishes a book series, New Atlantis Books, an imprint of Encounter Books. As of December 2012, six books have been released:
Robert Zubrin is an American aerospace engineer, author, and advocate for human exploration of Mars. He and his colleague at Martin Marietta, David Baker, were the driving force behind Mars Direct, a proposal in a 1990 research paper intended to produce significant reductions in the cost and complexity of such a mission. The key idea was to use the Martian atmosphere to produce oxygen, water, and rocket propellant for the surface stay and return journey. A modified version of the plan was subsequently adopted by NASA as their "design reference mission". He questions the delay and cost-to-benefit ratio of first establishing a base or outpost on an asteroid or another Apollo program-like return to the Moon, as neither would be able to provide all of its own oxygen, water, or energy; these resources are producible on Mars, and he expects people would be there thereafter.
Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition.
David Pearce is a British transhumanist philosopher. He is the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, currently rebranded and incorporated as Humanity+. Pearce approaches ethical issues from a lexical negative utilitarian perspective.
Friendly artificial intelligence is hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would have a positive (benign) effect on humanity or at least align with human interests or contribute to fostering the improvement of the human species. It is a part of the ethics of artificial intelligence and is closely related to machine ethics. While machine ethics is concerned with how an artificially intelligent agent should behave, friendly artificial intelligence research is focused on how to practically bring about this behavior and ensuring it is adequately constrained.
Leon Richard Kass is an American physician, scientist, educator, and public intellectual. Kass is best known as a proponent of liberal arts education via the "Great Books," as a critic of human cloning, life extension, euthanasia and embryo research, and for his tenure as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005. Although Kass is often referred to as a bioethicist, he eschews the term and refers to himself as "an old-fashioned humanist. A humanist is concerned broadly with all aspects of human life, not just the ethical."
James J. Hughes is an American sociologist and bioethicist. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the associate provost for institutional research, assessment, and planning at UMass Boston. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future and is currently writing a book about moral bioenhancement tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha: Using Neurotechnology to Become Better People.
Techno-progressivism or tech-progressivism is a stance of active support for the convergence of technological change and social change. Techno-progressives argue that technological developments can be profoundly empowering and emancipatory when they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that their costs, risks and benefits are all fairly shared by the actual stakeholders to those developments. One of the first mentions of techno-progressivism appeared within extropian jargon in 1999 as the removal of "all political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization".
Yuval Levin is an American conservative political analyst, academic, and journalist. He is the founding editor of National Affairs (2009–present), the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (2019–present), and a contributing editor of National Review (2007–present) and co-founder and a senior editor of The New Atlantis (2003–present).
Gregory Stock is an American biophysicist, best-selling author, biotech entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA’s School of Medicine. His interests lie in the scientific and evolutionary as well as ethical, social and political implications of today's revolutions in the life sciences and in information technology and computers.
Russell Blackford is an Australian writer, philosopher, and literary critic.
The wisdom of repugnance or "appeal to disgust", also known informally as the yuck factor, is the belief that an intuitive negative response to some thing, idea, or practice should be interpreted as evidence for the intrinsically harmful or evil character of that thing. Furthermore, it refers to the notion that wisdom may manifest itself in feelings of disgust towards anything which lacks goodness or wisdom, though the feelings or the reasoning of such 'wisdom' may not be immediately explicable through reason.
Glenn E. McGee is the Dean of Admissions at Salem College and Professor of health sciences at Salem College. He has been noted for his work on reproductive technology and genetics and for advancing a theory of pragmatic bioethics, as well as the role of ethicists in society and in local and state settings in particular.
Wesley J. Smith is an American lawyer and author, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism, a politically conservative non-profit think tank. He is also a consultant for the Patients Rights Council. Smith is known for his criticism of animal rights, environmentalism, assisted suicide and utilitarian bioethics. He is also the host of the Humanize podcast.
Jonathan D. Moreno is an American philosopher and historian who specializes in the intersection of bioethics, culture, science, and national security, and has published seminal works on the history, sociology and politics of biology and medicine. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Charles T. Rubin is a political science professor, philosopher and writer. Rubin was raised in Cleveland, Ohio and attended nearby Case Western Reserve University, receiving a bachelor's degree in philosophy and political science in 1975. He went on to study at Boston College, where he graduated with a doctoral degree in 1983 and also where he met his wife Leslie Rubin, a fellow political science academic. Rubin and his wife taught at Kenyon College before both moving to Duquesne University as professors and raising their children. Rubin began at Duquesne as an assistant professor in 1987 and continued teaching there for over 30 years. He was appointed as an endowed chair in 2019.
Katrina Alicia Karkazis is an American anthropologist and bioethicist. She is a professor of Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. She was previously the Carol Zicklin Endowed Chair in the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College, City University of New York and a senior research fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University. She has written widely on testosterone, intersex issues, sex verification in sports, treatment practices, policy and lived experiences, and the interface between medicine and society. In 2016, she was jointly awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship with Rebecca Jordan-Young.
The Transhumanist Party is a political party in the United States. The party's platform is based on the ideas and principles of transhumanist politics, e.g., human enhancement, human rights, science, life extension, and technological progress.
The term directed evolution is used within the transhumanist community to refer to the idea of applying the principles of directed evolution and experimental evolution to the control of human evolution. In this sense, it is distinct from the use of the term in biochemistry, which refers only to the evolution of proteins and RNA. Maxwell J. Melhmanh has described directed evolution of humans as the Holy Grail of transhumanism. Oxford philosopher Julian Savulescu wrote that:
Humanity until this point has been a story of evolution for the survival genes - survival and reproduction ... we are entering a new phase of human evolution—evolution under reason—where human beings are masters of their destiny. Power has been transferred from nature to science.
Transhumanist politics constitutes a group of political ideologies that generally express the belief in improving human individuals through science and technology. Specific topics include space migration, and cryogenic suspension. It is considered the opposing ideal to the concept of bioconservatisim, as Transhumanist politics argue for the use of all technology to enhance human individuals.
Deakin University Lecturer in Health Ethics and Professionalism Tamara Kayali Browne and University of Oxford Senior Research Fellow Steve Clarke understand bioconservatism as "a term that is often used to describe those who wish to conserve humanity as it is, and so oppose human enhancement."
You are also correct in noting that The New Atlantis is not a peer-reviewed scientific publication. It is, rather, editorially reviewed — like many other journals and magazines intended for a wide public audience
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