Playing God with Emerging Technologies

Public debates over the morality of new or emerging technologies tend to devolve into false dichotomies of optimism versus pessimism. Playing God with Emerging Technologies: How to Avoid the Traps of Techno-Optimism and Techno-Pessimism provides a conceptual apparatus for engaging in such debates in a critical manner through the constructive lens of “playing God” arguments. Moti Mizrahi sketches a conceptual framework consisting of an argumentation scheme for “playing God” arguments along with Critical Questions. This framework can be used to analyze and evaluate “playing God” arguments as they are made in debates over the ethical development and deployment of new or emerging technologies, such as solar geoengineering, Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles, autonomous weapons, and more.

Mizrahi argues that “playing God” arguments allow us to assume an intermediate, critical attitude between the extremes of hype and panic as well as approach the governance of new or emerging technologies in ways that might help to increase our control over, improve our understanding of, and prevent our misuse or abuse of such technologies.