Ahead Of The Curve: Anticipating Ethical, Legal, and Societal Issues Posed by Emerging Weapons Technologies

April 22-23, 2014

University of Notre Dame

“Ahead of the Curve” will provide a forum to discuss the “action-oriented” chapters of the soon-to-be-released National Academy of Science’s report, “Emerging and Readily Available Technologies and National Security.” The report was commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in order to begin a discussion about the conduct and applications of research on military technology as well as their unforseen and inadvertant consequences. Speakers will include members of the NAS committee that wrote the report, along with distinguished experts on the ethics, law, and social impacts of new weapons technologies and representatives of agencies and organizations that are home to cutting-edge weapons research. Presentations will address the ethical, legal, and societal issues that policy makers, researchers, and industries need to anticipate as new technologies arise, specifically in fields such as robotics, autonomous systems, prosthetics and human enhancement, cyber weapons, information warfare technologies, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology. Our primary goal is to help government agencies, institutions, and researchers grow the expertise necessary for early and continuing engagement with the ethical, legal, and societal implications of new weapons technologies as they are planned and developed. We also aim to generate a broad public audience for the NAS report, this being an area in which public education is necessary, as is elevating the level of factually well-informed, public discourse.

via Ahead of the Curve // John J. Reilly Center // University of Notre Dame.