In an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Vince Cakic, a psychologist at the University of Sydney, notes the increasing use of nootropic "smart drugs" such as Provigil, Ritalin, and Dexedrine to boost academic performance rather than for their prescribed medical uses. And, he writes that as more students indulge in non-medical uses of these drugs, academic institutions may attempt to ban academic performance-enhancing drugs in the same manner as drugs for athletic performance. Athletic doping, he notes, has been notorious difficult to eliminate, and academic institutions could be pushed to extremes to try to eliminate nootropics. They could even, he imagines, require students to take urine tests before exams and throughout the semester.

This is less an issue for the current crop of nootropics, whose effect Cakic deems "modest." But there are more sophisticated drugs in the works, and he believes that soon better grades could be available in a little orange bottle. The question is: should schools bother to ban these drugs at all? Cakic points out that the academic playing field isn't exactly level to begin with, and some students benefit, perhaps unfairly, from expensive private education or having more time to study than fellow students who have to work. Perhaps, he writes, schools shouldn't regard nootropic use as cheating, though the issues don't end there:

The long term safety of smart drugs in healthy people is unknown, and this might prove a good, and perhaps the only, reason to attempt to restrict their use. Mr Cakic points to the use of caffeine, which is known to enhance sporting performance. It is a form of 'cheating' that is tolerated, he says, because it is relatively harmless.

Increase in 'academic doping' could spark routine urine tests for exam students [EurekaAlert]

In a paper published in this month's Neuroscience, philosopher Adam Shriver suggested that genetically engineering cows to feel no pain could be an acceptable alternative to eliminating factory farming. And some neuroscientists are on their way to making Shriver's suggestion a very real possibility. Zhou-Feng Chen, a neuroscientist at Washington University, has been working on identifying the genes that "affective" pain, the unpleasantness associated with painful sensations. Chen and his team have identified a gene called P311, and have found that mice who lack P311 do not have negative associations with pain, although they do react negatively to heat and pressure. Chen believes that, with the removal of the same P311 gene, livestock like pigs and cows could be engineered to feel no pain.

So what are the ethicists saying? Peter Singer, the famed bioethicist and author of Animal Liberation, has often advocated vegetarianism and veganism to avoid animal suffering, but says if livestock could be bred to feel no pain, he would not take issue with the cruelty aspect of factory farming. However Singer, and other ethicists note that, even with pain-free meat, the environmental impact of factory farming cannot be ignored.

Pain-free animals could take suffering out of farming [New Scientist]

Brotherton, who organizes the Launchpad astronomy workshop for science fiction authors, has posted a couple of really great blog posts recently about how science fiction authors sometimes know more about the implications of science than scientists themselves. In one post, he just seems at first to be wishing that mainstream culture should pay more attention to science fiction, but then he adds:

Cloning was a scary fantasy, but not more, in movies and books, before the reality of Dolly the Sheep. Then to make sense of this development for public policy they called in experts like…doctors and clergy?

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The science fiction community had been talking about this for decades in serious ways and had a grasp of it better than even the people involved with the actual research. I mean, the creator of Dolly thought that cloning humans was a bad idea because if a couple cloned the father, say, to have a child, the mother would then find the child sexually attractive when he grew up. WTF??? Seriously, this was his position.

And then in another post, entitled "Scientists Sometimes Need To Think Like Science Fiction Authors," Brotherton examines a scientific proposal for focusing SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) scans, which is based on the assumption that alien civilizations would be doing the same thing we are: looking for exoplanets when they're eclipsing their suns. (I'm simplifying slightly here.) But science fiction writers will point out that it's a fallacy to assume that these alien civilizations are at the exact same level of technological development as ourselves. Assuming civiliation is a long-lived phenomenon, the aliens could be a century or more advanced than we are.

Both posts are well worth reading in their entirety, for a thought-provoking discussion of the ways in which pure science and science fiction can help to fill each other's gaps. Dolly The Sheep image by Monika Teal.

Under the law, the difference between an act of sex and an act of assault hinges on one idea: consent. If a person agrees to have sex with you, you're having sex. If they don't agree, or actively disagree, it's a crime. Obviously there are gray areas, and that's why rape trials exist - in the best cases, such trials are intended to determine whether consent was given.

But what about robots? Do you think the blondie bot in Cherry 2000 was really capable of giving consent to have sex with her human boyfriend? Or did her programming simply force her to always have sex, whether she wanted to or not? And what about the Romeo Droid in Circuitry Man, or the Sex Mecha in AI, who live entirely to sexually please women, even when those women are abusing them or putting them in danger?

Then there's the opposite problem, which Ekaterina Sedia tackles in her recent novel Alchemy of Stone. Her main character is a robot whose creator built her without genitals. Even when she wants to have sex, her body makes it impossible for her to consent in a recognizable way (though she does manage to figure out a technical workaround).

Whether programmed to have sex, or designed to refuse it, the problem these fictional bots face is a lack of control over their own desires. You can't really be said to consent to sex if you're never given the option to choose between "yes" and "no."

Cat Rambo has written a short story where one of the characters is a female superhero whose mad scientist creators made her hyper-sexual. No matter what happens, she's always aroused, regardless of whether she wants to be or not. Her solution to this design feature is never to have sex with anyone. She doesn't like the idea of being trapped inside a sexual desire that a bunch of men designed into her without consent.

Researcher David Levy got a lot of media attention for his recent book Love and Sex with Robots, where he argues that by 2050, people won't just be having sex with bots - they'll be falling in love with them, and even marrying them. He talks about the development of emotional and social robots, creatures programmed to perceive and imitate human emotions. Already, roboticists at MIT have created several models of bot that respond to facial expressions and tone of voice with so-called appropriate emotions: An angry voice makes the bot cower; a smile returns a smile.

But of course these emotional robots have been programmed with what somebody thinks is an appropriate response - sort of the way Rambo's superhero has been programmed to respond to everything with sexual arousal. If we accept that robots will achieve human-like intelligence, it seems likely that such bots will sense a difference between what their programming makes them do and what they actually want to do.

So if a robot has been programmed to respond to human sexual arousal with more sexual arousal of its own, is he actually consenting? Or is he just going through the motions of pleasure and desire, wishing that he could control his own responses enough to choose whom he had sex with, and when?

Questions like these, raised in science fiction or speculative science writing like Levy's, are inevitably really questions about ourselves. As of yet, we have no bots who are sophisticated enough to experience intimate relationships with humans - by programming, or by choice. But as humans, we often exist in the gray areas of consent when it comes to sex. Our physical desires, our basic sexual programming, may conflict with what we actually want to do.

Certainly there are many situations where it is obvious that consent has not been given, or has been. But for all the situations in the middle, we are like the bots we imagine that one day we will fall in love with. We cannot untangle what we think we should do (our social programming) from what we want to do. Or we can't disengage our raging physical urges (more programming) long enough to ask, "Wait, do I really want to have sex with this person? Or do I just want to have sex with anything, including furniture?" In Charles Stross' excellent novel Children of Saturn, the always-randy sexbot heroine knows the answer to this question, and responds by humping hotel rooms and spaceships.

So will you ever be able to have consensual sex with a robot? Maybe. Sometimes. Unless you aren't bothered by having sex with a slave or a brainwashed victim, having relationships with robots will probably be just as complicated as having them with humans.

This is the first in a series of columns called Fully Functional that I'll be writing about science fiction and sex. If there are any topics you want me to tackle, pipe up in comments. Nothing is too weird for me. Really. Nothing.

Atlas Sports Genetics, a testing company in Boulder, Colorado, analyzes children’s ACTN3 gene, which has been linked with athletic performance. Certain variants of the gene supposedly indicate whether an individual is predisposed to excelling at certain sports based on the involvement of speed, power, and endurance in each sport. Atlas advertises its wares by suggesting to their parents that their child could be a future Olympic champion, and claiming that their test could identify that championship ability in weeks rather than potentially wasteful years years.

Currently, the predictive abilities of these tests are dubious. But even if these and other genetic tests become accurate predictors of ability, there is a lot of doubt as to whether children should be assigned any sort of ability orientation. Some note that the tests are less for the benefit of children than for parents with Olympic and All-American dreams:

“I find it worrisome because I don’t think parents will be very clear-minded about this,” said William Morgan, an expert on the philosophy of ethics and sport and author of “Why Sports Morally Matter.” “This just contributes to the madness about sports because there are some parents who will just go nuts over the results.

“The problem here is that the kids are not old enough to make rational autonomous decisions about their own life,” he said. (NYT “Born to Run? Little Ones Get Test for Sports Gene”)

William Salaten at Slate’s Human Nature blog sees something more insidious at work, noting that this test could result in our culture performing a kind of environmental eugenics, creating a Gattaca-like future where children are barred from certain activities:

What's really disturbing about this idea, in the case of ACNT3, is that it isn't crazy. The data make a strong case that being XX really does lock you out of success at the highest levels of sprinting and power sports. From an individual standpoint, that doesn't much matter: You can run track, play pickup basketball, and live happily ever after. But from your country's standpoint, putting you on the track team is a waste. We need that slot for an RR kid, and we need a genetic test to find him.

And, notes Lisa Belkin at the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, putting a child in only activities in which they succeed can actually be counterproductive to a child’s development into a full-fledged person:

What I fear it would become is one more way for parents to insure that their children never learn to fail. In her latest book, “Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking: Powerful, Practical Strategies to Build a Lifetime of Resilience, Flexibility and Happiness,” the psychologist Tamar Chansky argues that this is one of the most fundamental jobs of a parent, and one we don’t tend to do very well…If you never fail, she writes, you never learn that you can pick yourself back up again. And that’s a lesson best learned young, while your center of gravity is low and it doesn’t hurt as much to fall down.

It seems that in all this, the core problem is that parents are purchasing tests like these for their children, who are too young to exert autonomy over their situations and too easily seen as a collection of genes rather than the humans they will evolve into. Perhaps the problems of eugenics and pigeonholing could be alleviated by performing non-medical consumer genetic testing only on people who are able to consent to it.

[Atlas Sports Genetics via New York Times]

In the future, human soldiers may see the battlefield through a World of Warcraft-like interface, complete with tagged enemies and multiple channels of chat. Plus, human rights workers will use covert computer technologies to get information about war zones out to the public before censorship regimes can stop their internet traffic. This is just a snippet of what got discussed at Technology in Wartime.

Prominent computer scientists, robotics experts, and tech policy experts argued for an entire day about the ethics of building computerized weapons, and how to defeat closed regimes with sneaky software. Some suggested that you could program ethics into a weapon, while others argued passionately that you should never take money from the Department of Defense to fund your work. What's great about these videos is that you can see all the participants' presentations, as well as their discussions with members of the audience. There's really nothing like watching Bruce Schneier arguing with a covert operations expert from the Navy. Or watching Cindy Cohn from EFF jump up and down while yelling about AT&T. Or watching Kevin Poulsen tease Herb Lin about government secrecy. Check out the videos, linked from the CPSR website and hosted on Archive.org. AP Photo/Yonhap, Sim Un-chul

Technology in Wartime video [CPSR]