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Articles

Technologists & Ethicists

Stephen L. Anderson laments inadequate moral insight among tech leaders.

For many of us the world’s first global pandemic for a century was a watershed moment. The Covid-19 crisis was plausibly claimed to have been caused by risky ‘gain-of-function research’: that is, through the deliberate enhancing of viruses. That would be a tremendous technological achievement, but also an ominous one. It would also be a global example of what can happen when human technical ability is untethered from adequate moral reflection: global disaster. Nor is this the first time we’ve glimpsed how terrifying human invention can be.

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