Peter Singer & his AI chatbot

…Today, while we have made significant strides in recognising gender equality, we also see growing recognition of animal rights, such as laws against cruelty and exploitation. What was once dismissed as laughable—the idea that animals deserve moral consideration—is now widely accepted.

This brought our conversation to a contemporary question: with the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, could similar arguments apply to AI? I asked Prof. Singer: based on this logic, shouldn't moral consideration also be extended to AI if it exhibits sentience? Prof.'s response was thought-provoking. He explained that if AI were to develop genuine consciousness—not merely imitating it—it would indeed warrant moral consideration and rights. He emphasised that sentience, or the capacity to experience suffering and pleasure, is the key factor. If AI systems eventually demonstrate true sentience, we would have a moral obligation to treat them accordingly, just as we do with sentient animals.

This possibility raises profound questions about the future of ethics. How would we recognise true consciousness in AI? What responsibilities would we have toward such entities? And how might our understanding of moral consideration evolve further? The boundaries of ethical reasoning are never fixed—they expand as we deepen our understanding of the world and the beings within it.

Later, after our breakfast and during the car ride back (thanks to Bro. Jono!), I thought of putting AI to the test. Because I just learnt from Prof. about an AI chatbot modelled after him (freely accessible online) at

https://www.petersinger.ai

I decided to ask the chatbot the same question posed to Prof. ("What is wisdom?"), compare its response with his actual reply, and share it with him on the spot!
(Continues)

https://open.substack.com/pub/boldreasoningwithpetersinger/p/breakfast-with-peter-singer-reflections?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Questions APR 3

 1. How did James Rockwell and his subject cohorts sabotage their drug study?

2. Why is speed critical in getting drugs approved and on the shelves as early as possible?

3. What motivated homeless alcoholics to participate in trials for Eli Lilly, according to its director of clinical pharmacology?

4. Guinea pigs rely mainly on what to insure their safety?

5. The target audience for the jobzine Guinea Pig Zero was who?

6. DARPA projects include research on drugsto keep soldiers awake and fed for how long?

7. Radiation exposure from nuclear testing on American soil in the '50s was comparable to what?

8. Fear of chemical weapons during the Gulf War led to the administration of what vaccine prior to FDA approval?

9. Gulf War vets and their children have been diagnosed with what?

10. What percentage of DARPA projects fail?

11. How did New York city law enforcement officials help researchers in the mid '90s?

DQ

• Should "guineau-pigging" be a job?
• For how long should drug patents be issued?
• Have you participated in any drug trials? Do you want to?
• "What happens when both parties involved in a trial see the enterprise primarily as a way of making money?" 292
• Are for-profit IRBs inherently compromised?
• COMMENT on the Susan Endersbe case. 295
• How should test subjects be procured? Should there be a cap on how much doctors can earn for procuring them?
• How would you fix our "patchwork regulatory system"? 300
• Should medical research aimed at enhancing soldiers' competence, stamina, and endurance be held to different ethical standards?  Is all really fair in (love and) war?
• Is there an ethically-defensible military rationale for "race-based" or "man-break" tests? 302
• What's your response to any of the questions at the top of p.302?
• Should all soldiers be required to sign waivers allowing the administration of any drugs deemed necessary or appropriate? Does military service tacitly allow drug experimentation in the interests of "national security"?

CB part 9, epilog

1. What is the IGI, why was its original name rejected, and what is one of its core principles? 401 -2
2. What role did university research labs begin taking on in March 2020? 411
3. How did Doudna expedite the legal process of getting approval to test outsiders? 417
4. What's SHERLOCK? 424 
5. What did Doudna call "the awesomely good thing about this terrible [COVID] situation"? 430
6.  Biology should not remain what, says Isaacson? 445
7. In what "larger" sense do CRISPR treatments come from reprogramming? 457
8. Why have blacks historically distrusted medical trials? 461
9. What standard constraints did not apply in the race to beat COVID, with what result? 473-4 What fundamental aspect of science will remain the same? 475
10. What promise of CRISPR might also be its peril? What does Isaacson now see more, peril or promise? What does he think we should decide? 480-81

FINAL REPORT PRESENTATIONS

Time to SIGN UP for final report presentations, beginning Apr 1 (no foolin'). We'll do one or two presentations per class. Indicate your preferences in the comments space below.

Presentation to be complemented with a final report blog post,* discussing and elaborating the main points of your presentation, due May 2. Everyone will need to sign up as an AUTHOR on this site. Post an early draft for constructive feedback or to use in your presentation.

* 1,000 words minimum, plus bloggish content: embedded links, relevant images/video etc.

APR

1 Beyond 28-31; Codebreaker Parts Seven, Eight-The Moral Questions, Dispatches from the Front.

3 Beyond 32-34; Codebreaker Part Nine-Coronavirus.

8 Beyond 35-36; Future Part I-The Long View. Presentation: Jaxon

10 Beyond 37-39; Future Part II-Trajectory Changes. Presentation: David

15 Beyond 40-42; Future Part III-Safeguarding Civilisation. Presentations: Tara, Danny (be sure to coordinate, to avoid redundancy)

17 Beyond 43-50 Future Part IV-Assessing the End of the World. Presentation: Devin

22 Beyond 51-54; Future Part V-Taking Action. Presentation: Martha

24 Final report presentations conclude (or we'll have a study/review day)

29  Last class. Exam 2 (NOTE: Exam 2  is not a "final exam," it is the exam covering material since Exam 1.)

MAY

2 Final blogposts due (post early draft for constructive feedback)

Questions APR 1

Conclude Midterm report presentations, begin Final report presentations... Martha, Aidan

1. The greatest advances in health and longevity should go to what?

2. Why was BiDil removed from the market?

3. What broad consensus now obtains regarding health differences between and within groups?

4. Funding in 2014 was 50% greater for research areas including the word gene (etc.) than for those including the word _____.

5. Name an "unthinkable" medical experiment to which incarcerated individuals have been subjected.

6. Creating ethical standards for medical research is the flip-side of what "coin"?

7. Most viewers of The Constant Gardener would probably conclude what, mistakenly, about its fictional drug company?

8. Apart from being extraordinarily lucrative for the local doctors who procure test subjects in developing countries, what's another important reason why so much human research is conducted in Africa and other poor regions outside the U.S.?

9. Research in Nigeria for Pfizer was compromised by an apparently fraudulent claim involving a nonexistent what?

10. What two questions should be prerequisite to conducting research in the third world? What should precede human research anywhere in the world?

CB 7-8

1. With what deep moral and spiritual questions will we have to wrestle in the coming decades, and  what's the continuum conundrum? 336-7 What categories of genetic modification might we want to add to treatment and enhancement? 339
2. What does the complexity of sickle-cell anemia remind us of, when we're contemplating "messing with Mother Nature"? 343
3. How is the moral status of deafness different from skin color and sexual orientation? 348
4. What DARPA enhancement project is already underway with Doudna's lab? 351
5. What does Isaacson say about Nozick's Experience Machine thought experiment? 353=4
6. What was John Rawls's position on genetic engineering? What was Nozick's response? 358
7. What was Michael Sandel's argument against "playing God"? 365
8. Doudna became more sympathetic to what view about gene-editing? 369
9. Should Steve Jobs have thought differently? 371
10. What's Feng Zhang's objection to making enhancements? 376
11. What became of Isaacson's edited gene? 383
12. How did James Watson cross a line? What's the Jefferson conundrum? 386, 390

DQ

• Do you have a duty to be your best self? To whom?
• Is aging a "scourge worse that smallpox"? 265
• How can emergent biomedicine be suitably tailored to public (not just personal & profitable) health?
• COMMENT: "Health is determined by far more than health care." 269
• What forms of preventive medicine/health care do you think would have the greatest constructive impact on health in the U.S.?
• Is there any rationale for ever using human "guinea pigs" for research?
• Are adequate safeguards in place to prevent future research abuses targeting prison populations?
• What do you think of South Carolina's kidney proposal 278
• What's wrong with offering incentives to imprisoned women to donate their eggs?
• Have you read and/or seen The Constant Gardener? What's your review? (If you haven't, are you mad at Marcia Angell for her spoilers)?
• What do you think of CG's Hollywood ending (in the film)?

I Vaccinated My Children. But Here’s Why My Neighbors Don’t.

"…a lot has changed. Many Americans have lost trust in public health agencies and the advice they offer, especially in more conservative parts of the country like mine. That declining trust is showing up in personal choices: In 2018, some 46,000 Texans requested vaccine exemption forms from the Texas Department of State Health Services. In 2024, more than 93,000 did.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd still follow my pediatrician's advice and vaccinate my children. But in the years since Covid, I increasingly understand the thought process of my neighbors who do not..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/opinion/measles-public-health-trust.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

 Trump Administration Abruptly Cuts Billions From State Health Services

States have been told that they can no longer use grants that were funding infectious disease management and addiction services.

By Apoorva MandavilliMargot Sanger-Katz and Jan Hoffman

March 26, 2025

The Department of Health and Human Services has abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states that were being used for tracking infectious diseases, mental health services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues.

The cuts are likely to further hamstring state health departments, which are already underfunded and struggling with competing demands from chronic diseases, resurgent infections like syphilis and emerging threats like bird flu.

State health departments began receiving notices on Monday evening that the funds, which were allocated during the Covid-19 pandemic, were being terminated, effective immediately.

“No additional activities can be conducted, and no additional costs may be incurred, as it relates to these funds,” the notices said.

For some, the effect was immediate.

In Lubbock, Texas, public health officials have received orders to stop work supported by three grants that helped fund the response to the widening measles outbreak there, according to Katherine Wells, the city’s director of public health.

On Tuesday, some state health departments were preparing to lay off dozens of epidemiologists and data scientists. Others, including Texas, Maine and Rhode Island, were still scrambling to understand the impact of the cuts before taking any action.

Continues Here:  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/health/trump-state-health-grants-cuts.html

Top F.D.A. Vaccine Official Resigns, Citing Kennedy’s ‘Misinformation and Lies’

Dr. Peter Marks, a veteran of the agency, wrote that undermining confidence in vaccines is irresponsible and a danger to public health.

By Christina JewettSheryl Gay Stolberg and Noah Weiland  The New York Times

·       March 28, 2025

The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure Friday and said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency’s acting commissioner. He reiterated the sentiments in an interview, saying: “This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.”

Dr. Marks resigned after he was summoned to the Department of Health and Human Services Friday afternoon and told that he could either quit or be fired, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Dr. Marks led the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which authorized and monitored the safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and gene therapies. He was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic but had come under criticism for being overly generous to companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.

Continues Here:  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/health/fda-vaccines-rfk-jr-peter-marks.html

The public health scenario that keeps epidemiologists up at night

"…What keeps epidemiologists up at night is a scenario where bird flu gains the ability to spread efficiently among humans. Letting the virus spread widely among animals increases its chances of evolving to do so. And if we do end up in this nightmare scenario, the virus will already have mutated — so there's no way to know if such a variant would be milder, or much more deadly. It's also worth remembering that a virus doesn't need a mortality rate of 50 percent to devastate society. Some scholars estimate that the mortality rate of the 1918 flu pandemic was most likely only around 2 or 3 percent..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/opinion/bird-flu-america-death.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

We’re In a New Age of Techno-Spiritualism

"…a growing market of A.I. products promise[s] users an experience that closely approximates the impossible: communicating and even "reuniting" with the deceased. Some of the representations — like those offered by HereAfter AI and StoryFile, which also frames its services as being of historical value — can be programmed with the person's memories and voice to produce realistic holograms or chatbots with which family members or others can converse.

The desire to bridge life and death is innately human. For millenniums, religion and mysticism have offered pathways for this — blurring the lines of logic in favor of the belief in eternal life..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/opinion/grief-tech-ai-optimized.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The Story of One Woman Who Fell Prey to the Medical Freedom Movement

"…Ms. Kali had grown up in a family that revered the principles of all-natural living. She liked her burritos G.M.O.-free and her milk raw. She was wary of medical interventions that exposed the body to chemicals and radiation. Sometimes she suspected that the entire medical system had been captured by special interests. She wanted health care that felt caring, not the impersonality and inaccessibility that she encountered in hospitals. And so while she agreed to undergo surgery to excise her tumor, she declined to follow up with an oncologist. Instead, she began searching for alternatives.

While only a small percentage of people diagnosed with cancer reject standard medical care entirely, surveys have found that one in five Americans has used alternative medicine in place of conventional medicine at some point. Nearly one in three Americans has reported avoiding doctors, often owing to distrust of the medical system or a history of negative experiences.

In her quest for options outside traditional medicine, Ms. Kali found herself part of what has become known as the health freedom movement. In the past 25 years, the movement has stitched together yoga moms, flag-waving anti-maskers, alternative healers, disenchanted doctors and other fellow travelers who believe that the government has no business meddling in personal health decisions. With the installment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, what was once a fringe coalition of grass-roots activists and libertarians now controls the regulatory halls of power..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/medical-freedom-cancer-rfk.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Should There Be Limits to Research on Human Embryos?

"…what kind of testing can be done on embryos in the name of optimizing future lives. Embryos are at the center of divorce cases that are part property dispute, part custody battle.

What kind of rules should govern this research? Should businesses that profit from embryos be subject to any kind of oversight? And how should the law speak of them? Wherever embryos appear, they bring with them serious ethical and intellectual questions about what meaning or place they hold in our society.

The political fights over abortion demand a great deal of attention. But embryos also demand and warrant a meaningful conversation about everything they represent: values, knowledge, family, religion, health, life, death and more. The boundaries of what we are doing with embryos are shifting quickly. Any attempt to shape the future of how we treat them has to engage with these questions now…"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/opinion/human-embryo-experiments-timeline.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

All hands on deck

I'm back, to class if not fully to form. We're behind, obviously, and need to catch up. All who had their presentations postponed, be ready. 

And: Happy Opening Day! Expectations for my team are low, but today they begin the year in first place. Let's go!

 

And remember:

Questions MAR 27

Presentation: Michael, Sawyer, Madi, Martha

1. In this touted Age of Genomics, what frequently follows the hopeful hype about gene therapy?

2. Steve Jones says we know what of genetics?

3. What was Francis Collins' prediction in 2000? In 2014?

4. What's the best way to engineer a tall person, and what does that tell us about the effects of "Many Assorted Genes..."?

5. "Anonymous" tissue samples can be what?

6. What is Jessica Cussins' practical objection to the results of DTC genetic tests?

7. What more than doubled in illustration of the "Angelina Jolie effect"?

8. There aren't enough what to support population-wide screening for the BRCA genes?

9. The UC-Berkeley DNA project was intended to introduce students to what?

10. How should leading geneticists have responded to loose talk in the early '90s (and still) about "the gay gene," "the violence gene," etc.?

DQ

• Who's responsible for over-hyping the promise of gene therapy?
• Why is the history of genomics so full of unfulfilled promise?
• If short people are discriminated against, is the solution to engineer tall people? Or to oppose discrimination more aggressively?
• Do you agree that we should divert billions from genomic research to behavioral modification? 249
• Why do patients who support genomic research nonetheless "want to be informed..."? 251
• Is there any reason in principle why 23andMe's algorithm could not be corrected to detect and distinguish gene mutations that are and are not life-threatening? 253
• Is there anything ethically wrong with women electing for prophylactic mastectomies?
• Do the risks of universal screening for the BRCA genes outweigh the benefits? 
• If there were enough genetic counselors to support population-wide screening, would you support it?
• Should patients be informed of mutations that are not found to correlate with increased cancer risk? 257
• Is it in fact "common knowledge" that there isn't a gene for homosexuality, etc.?

CB

1. (Oops - published out of sequence. See previous for CB part 6)

Health news... Weekly health quiz... WHQ 3/8... WHQ 3/3...  Treating Alzheimer's... Her son died. And then anti-vaxers attacked her

No class MAR 25

I'm sorry to report I'm still sick (but improving). Do continue to stay on track with the assigned readings and your posts. And sign up for Final Report Presentations (which will now probably begin late).

Just in case we need it to get caught up, save the date (from our designated final exam schedule): Thursday May 8, 3:30 - 5:30 pm

Why I Got the Measles Vaccine at Age 63

"…My own safety wasn't my chief concern. Doing everything I can to protect my fellow human beings who cannot be vaccinated — babies too young for the vaccine, people with compromised immune systems, people who are allergic to the components of the vaccine — seems to me to be the only moral thing to do for anyone living in close community with other people. And that's almost all of us.

Community is a concept that the MAGA movement is working overtime to undo, but human beings are a social species. We depend on one another for safety and survival. When we vaccinate our children, we are keeping them safe, but we are also keeping those who cannot be vaccinated safe. It's part of the social contract..."

Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/opinion/measles-vaccine-babies.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare