Post-Human Research

The ethics around researching "augmented humans" is something of particular interest to me, and will likely inform future research that I do. Human-centred research can be a minefield, and we should be thankful that we have to abide by particular strictures in constructing our research designs. As Heath and company point out, a substantial critique of obtaining informed consent is that research often changes significantly from beginning to end. Remaining tethered to a set of ethical guidelines can ensure that one doesn't stray too far from the path, no matter what new and revelatory findings might arise. (For an engrossing read, I strongly recommend the two-part piece on corruption in the two-part piece on corruption in the Toronto Police Dept. that has been running in Eye for the past two weeks. It focuses on what might be deemed a "research project" - an initial surveillance setup - that quickly spiralled into a massive, multi-year undercover mafia/drug bust that had to be abandoned when fears of early findings coming to light were brought up to the top brass.)

A different set of ethical concerns arise when studying the physical interconnection between humans and technology, whether one studies prosthesis or technology that breaks the skin. For those of you interested in the subject, I would strongly recommend that you jump over to the iTable section of the iSchool website and find the paper presented earlier this term by Dirk Rodenburg, a PhD student in the program. (The annotated copy, with notes from Brian Cantwell Smith, is particularly valuable.) Dirk writes about the ethics of the "enhanced human" athlete and, although his paper isn't necessarily a site for exploring the act of researching augmented humans, it offers great insight into how such a biological classification determines new ways of communicating with and about subjects. Katherine Hayles, in her book How We Became Posthuman, expands considerably on this subject. Do the same ethical guidelines we use with humans apply to cyborgs? At what point does an "augmented human" become a cyborg? How do we respect the human dignity of an augmented human, especially when there might be greater temptation to treat cyborgs as a means to an end in research?

What's interesting to me, is that a great deal of this knowledge is being hammered out by feminist technoscientists, building on the work of earlier post-structuralists (rather than traditional ethicists). Is the emergence of research on augmented or enhance humans a suitable locale for building in, at the kernel level, things like race/sex/gender issues, access, privacy, and agency? And what of informed consent? If new research in this area is increasingly being done on subjects with severe physical and cognitive disabilities, how does this impact the necessity of capturing informed consent? Consider, for example, the somewhat recent case of Stephen Hawking's wife. He, of course, has been the most prominent "test subject" of research on the augmented body. How does the introduction of a "controlling and manipulative" person in his life impact the decisions that are made around his body as a blank canvas?