Last week an exhilarating and perplexing mixture of visionaries, philosophers, transhumanists, legal scholars, and technophiles along with some crackpots and naysayers gathered for a two day meeting at Stanford University's Law School to ponder the future of human enhancement and posthumanity. The occasion was the Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights (HETHR) conference. HETHR featured lectures ranging from sober discussions of the parental rights and the consent of the unborn and future generations, to the use of steroids and gene enhancement in sports and constitutional rights to enhancements, to uplifting animals to human level intelligence and uploading our personalities and memories into computer networks.
