Parthenogenatrics, a precursor to cybernetic/cloning ethics
The Seed of a Thought Process
The tendency of all species is to develop, advance, and be destroyed. Responsibility exists for intellectual beings to preserve humanity from this fate. Lucas Seidman, raised on a car lot, likes to think about the core thought processes of an individual human being as radiating from a personal center, more or less like an engine at the center of our being. Whatever fuels your engine, whatever components you put in your engine, whatever stimulus, whatever governing rules, thoughts or sentiments, has the effect of integrating rather deeply within you and then radiating outward. This is a permeation of everything you think or do, true to the definition. It's also a reason that Wal-Mart art maxims still have any useful effect on human life, within reason. This information, kept within the self, like the embers kept by the tribe's firekeeper, affects all processes within the individual and then becomes all of your productive thought and output in the form of communication or action. With that in mind, it is important to plant the seed within you or anyone deeply, that when contemplating the future of cybernetics, cloning, or any technology that could be disruptive to society, that the responsibility for the continued survival of the human race and care for all the life on this planet must be at the center of all productivity in the field. Anything less could bring about the destruction of the human race through digital or physical creation of synthetic beings. If you plant the seed of the protection and advancement, not only of humans but of all life on this planet, at the genesis of what you do, this is a natural and organic way of making sure that you end up with the correct logical, ethical, psychological, and legal effects of any scientific work surrounding synthetically created beings, in a digital, and then later a physical domain.
Parthenogenatric Studies
Parthenogenatric psychological studies explore the effect of having created another being from oneself on the human intellect. It charts the effect on the individual in a number of roles surrounding human parthenogenesis. It charts the effect in any collective human consciousness and greater society of inserting parthenogenatric creation into any extant community. What are our responsibilities to our creations and to each other as we create? This is the seed question that governs or rules the dynamics of creating something from where there was, at first, nothing. How will it affect everything else?
A simple proposition. Have for yourself a robot that cleans your floor. Have for yourself a parthenogenatric synthoid that cleans your floor. Your friend is having tea with you as the robot does its work. It slips and falls. What is your human response? In the separate scenario, you are having tea with your friend and your parthenogenatric synthoid slips and falls while cleaning. What is your human response and your interaction with the presence of your friend at tea, even in an instant, when the reflection of you--fully parthenogenatric to some degree--lies there splayed on the floor? Is there a difference in your response? Probably. And therein lies the science of parthenogenatric psychology, as dynamic as fluid, as complex as computers, as important as all Life itself.
The applications are nearly limitless, the domain not completely undefined, and yet there is so much more to learn about ourselves and to improve within ourselves through collective planning for synthetic life.
A blend of Disciplines
As the ability to create what was only science fiction 100 years ago surfaces in our communities, it will follow a timeline no different than any other technology. I can assemble from things UPS will deliver a rocket ship to space and assemble it in my backyard. The heaviest work in cloning and synthetic automaton creation is being done in a highly controlled environment today. Tomorrow, you will be able to DIY a robot to cut your grass. With this development, there will have to be, early and often, expectations for behavior, amounting to law and beyond psychology and ethics but informed by them, purely matters of the rule of law so that the freedom to advance into the future does not have a deleterious effect on one's neighbor and thus society as a whole. It’s keeping balance of the freedom of mankind to propagate cybernetics and cloning and all other related fields and the responsibility of having done so and the rights and responsibilities of citizens within a community as it relates to, at first digital and then fully synthetic human-like creations. Are we creating a sub class of human beings that we can "make" do anything? Should we? Why and why not? They will have individual existence as we understand it. Will they be subject to it, in all its mythological cyclical agony and ecstacy. Will they have themselves individual rights and responsibilities? Try a very direct question: Will it be acceptable to beat a cybernetic organism with simulated feeling in the streets? Will it be simple assault, no different than to strike a fellow citizen? Will it be an aggravated charge, akin to a hate crime, on the basis of their syntheticness? Beyond all the codified expectations for behavior as it relates to mankind as we find it now and robotic, cybernetic, or cloned organisms that we choose to integrate into society, what does our treatment of them say about us? This is the specific blend of science, synthetic philosophy, compiled ethics, and the law in its application surrounding this issue. The possibilities are quite vast and the Truth is that we must confront what is inside of ourselves as we plan a world in which we can create others.