Daily Archives: September 4, 2020

PR.com2020-09-03

Joliet, IL, September 03, 2020 --(PR.com)-- The Honorable Dr. Dale Pierre Layman, A.S., B.S., M.S., Ed.S., Ph.D. #1, Ph.D. #2, Grand Ph.D. in Medicine, MOIF, FABI, DG, DDG, LPIBA, IOM, AdVMed, AGE, is the Founder and President of Robowatch, L.L.C. (www.robowatch.info.) Robowatch is an international non-profit group aiming to keep a watchful human eye on the fast-moving developments occurring in the fields of robotics, computing, and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) industries. As the first person in his family to attend college in 1968, he earned an Associate of Science (A.S.) in Life Science from Lake Michigan College. The same year, he won a Michigan Public Junior College Transfer Scholarship to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1971, he received an Interdepartmental B.S. with Distinction, in Anthropology - Zoology, from the University of Michigan. From 1971 to 1972, Dr. Layman served as a Histological Technician in the Department of Neuropathology at the University of Michigan Medical School. From 1972 to 1974, he attended the U of M Medical School, Physiology department, and was a Teaching Fellow of Human Physiology. He completed his M.S. in Physiology from the University of Michigan in 1974.

From 1974 to 1975, Dr. Layman served as an Instructor in the Biology Department at Lake Superior State College. In 1975, he became a full-time, permanent Instructor in the Natural Science Department of Joliet Junior College (J.J.C.) and taught Human Anatomy, Physiology, and Medical Terminology to Nursing & Allied Health students. Appointed to the Governing Board of Text & Academic Authors, he authored several textbooks, including but not limited to the Terminology of Anatomy & Physiology and Anatomy Demystified. In 2003, Dr. Layman wrote the Foreword to the Concise Encyclopedia of Robotics, Stan Gibilisco.

As a renowned scholar and book author, Dr. Layman proposed The Faculty Ranking Initiative in the State of Illinois to increase the credibility of faculty members in the States two-year colleges, which will help with research grants or publications. In 1994, the State of Illinois accepted this proposal. J.J.C. adapted the change in 2000, and Dr. Layman taught full-time from 1975 until his retirement in 2007. He returned and taught part-time from 2008 to 2010. Dr. Layman received an Ed.S. (Educational Specialist) in Physiology and Health Science from Ball State University in 1979. Then, in 1986, Dr. Layman received his first Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, in Health and Safety Studies. In 2003, Dr. Layman received a second Ph.D. and a Grand Ph.D. in Medicine, from the Academie Europeenne D Informatisation (A.E.I.) and the World Information Distributed University (WIDU). He is the first American to receive the Grand Doctor of Philosophy in Medicine.

In 1999, Dr. Layman delivered a groundbreaking speech at the National Convention of Text and Academic Authors, Park City, Utah. Here, he first publicly explained his unique concept: Compu-Think, a contraction for computer-like modes or ways of human thinking. This reflects the dire need for humans to develop more computer-like modes or ways of Natural Human thinking. This concept has important practical applications to Human Health and Well-being. In 2000, Dr. Layman gave several major talks and received top-level awards. In May of 2000, he participated in a two-week faculty exchange program with Professor Harrie van Liebergen of the Health Care Division of Koning Willem I College, Netherlands.

In 2001, after attending an open lecture on neural implants at the University of Reading, England, Dr. Layman created Robowatch. The London Diplomatic Academy published several articles about his work, such as Robowatch (2001) and Robowatch 2002: Mankind at the Brink (2002). The article Half-human and half-computer, Andrej Kikelj (2003) discussed the far-flung implications of Dr. Laymans work. Using the base of half-human, half-computer, Dr. Layman coined the name of a new disease, Psychosomatic Technophilic, which translates as an abnormal love or attraction for technology [that replaces] the body and mind. Notably, Dr. Layman was cited several times in the article Transhumanism, (Wikipedia, 2009). Further in 2009, several debates about Transhumanism were published in Wikipedia, and they identified Dr. Layman as an anti-transhumanist who first coined the phrase, Terminator argument.

In 2018, Dr. Layman was featured in the cover of Pro-Files Magazine, 8th Edition, by Marquis Whos Who. He was the Executive Spotlight in Robotics, Computers and Artificial Intelligence, in the 2018 Edition of the Top 101 Industry Experts, by Worldwide Publishing. He also appeared on the cover of the July 2018 issue of T.I.P. (Top Industry Professionals) magazine, the International Association of Top Professionals. Dr. Layman was also the recipient of the prestigious Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award (2017-2018). Ever a Lifelong Student and taking classes for the past few years at J.J.C., Dr. Layman was recently inducted (2019) to his second formal induction into the worlds largest honor society for community college students, Phi Theta Kappa.

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The Honorable Dr. Dale Layman, Founder of Robowatch, LLC, is Recognized as the 2020 Humanitarian of the Year by Top 100 Registry, Inc. - IT News...

Christian DitterNetflix6 episodes

The first season of the Netflix series Biohackers, consisting of six episodes released on the streaming platform on 20 August, tells a fictional tale centered around the sociotechnological movement known as do-it-yourself (DIY) biology, in which amateurs, professionals, anarchists, and civic-minded citizens push the boundaries of mainstream biology. The shows main characters include a wealthy biopharmaceutical executive, a group of medical students, a number of stereotypical biohackers making animals glow and plants play music, and a community of transhumanists intent on modifying their bodies for seemingly impractical endeavors.

Whereas biological experimentation was once the sole domain of trained professionals in well-stocked and well-funded institutional labs, the field has been democratized by the emergence of the open-source movement, plummeting sequencing costs, greater access to reagents and devices, the proliferation of online resources, and the emergence of tools and methodologies that enable nonexperts to genetically engineer organisms without years of professional training. [Valid concerns regarding some of the activities associated with the DIY bio community have been voiced by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (1).]

Medical student Mia Akerlund (right) meets biohackers pushing the boundaries of mainstream biology.

The show follows Mia Akerlund (played by Luna Wedler), a first-year medical student vying for a position at a prestigious biopharmaceutical firm headed by celebrated professor Tanja Lorenz (Jessica Schwarz). Akerlund and Lorenz clearly have some shared history, as well as their own secrets, although viewers are not privy to the details of either at the start of the series. For much of the first episodes, the relationship between these two enigmatic characters is revealed slowly through both flash-forwards and flashbacks. But we know that a big reveal is coming; the programs official description teases a secret so big it could change the fate of humanity.

Throughout the seasons six fast-paced episodes, the viewer is exposed to technologies and techniques that would be familiar to many professional scientists. And while the time frames of the various experiments conducted are often compressed for dramatic effect, Christian Ditterthe shows creator, writer, director, and showrunnergoes out of his way to present complex science as accurately as possible. In one montage, for example, we watch various biohackers, some with better aseptic technique than others, add reagents to microcentrifuge tubes, load polymerase chain reaction machines, and examine gels to assess whether they have accurately created a desired genomic sequence. In another scene, a student suffering from a degenerative disease seeks to develop his own cure in a secret lab, where he can work without burdensome oversight. The student injects himself with an unknown liquid, his purported cure. Here, the shows dialogue surrounding the cure and its antidote (to be administered if things go wrong) offers insight into how RNA interference therapies work.

But the show also serves as a pedagogical vehicle to raise many timely and interesting ethical, legal, and social concerns. From bioluminescent mammals to the collection of genetic material for clinical trials, the series storyline highlights how cavalierly we sometimes approach genomic data and genetic engineering. Later episodes depict even more egregious examples of biohacking, including organisms modified to transmit viruses as efficiently as possible. At one point, a character suggests that the ends of her research justify the experimental means, even when her methods demonstrate a gross disregard for test subjects who may suffer as a result.

The show also offers insight into some of the motivations that drive DIY biology efforts. For example, in one scene, a confidant of Akerlund expresses dismay that Lorenz is willing to sell a cheaply acquired drug to desperate patients for inflated prices. Such frustrations are what drive many citizens operating outside traditional institutions to develop their own pharmaceutical solutions.

It is ironic that Biohackers is set in Germany, one of the few places where genetic engineering experimentation outside of licensed facilities is illegal and can result in a fine or even imprisonment (2). Yet, given all that transpires in the show, one is left with the sense that such measures maybe justified.

References and Notes:1. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, New directions: The ethics of synthetic biology and emerging technologies (2010).2. Sections 8 and 39 of the German Genetic Engineering Act [Gentechnikgesetz (GenTG)].

The reviewer is at Zvi Meitar Institute for Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies, Herzliya, Israel, and the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.

Read more:
The promise and perils of synthetic biology take center stage in a fast-paced new Netflix series - Science Magazine

Carrion is a reverse horror game in which you play as an amorphous creature of unknown origins.The game received universal acclaim from players and critics for its clever power-fantasy premise, as well as satisfying traversal and combat mechanics, which allow for gameplay that can be both strategic and chaotic.

The team behind the game is Polish developer called Phobia Game Studio, whose members previously shipped 2D platformer Butcher.

We caught up withKrzysztof Chomicki, game and level designer on Carrion, to discuss what it took to create the ultimate monster simulation experience of 2020. What follows below is the text version of the video interview that took place on August 13.

Krzysztof Chomicki, game and level designer onCarrion

Oleg Nesterenko, managing editor at GWO: Krzysztof, a couple of words about yourself and the studio, please.

Im the game and level designer at Phobia Game Studio. Were a very small development team based in Poland. We all work remotely. Im based in Krakow, Sebastian Krokiewicz, who is the brains behind the whole studio and our project, lives in Warsaw. Our sound designer, Maciej Niedzielski, is based in Zielona Gra, which is next to the German border. And on Carrion, video game and film composer Cris Velasco joined our team, hes from LA. He did the music for the game.

Carrion team.From left to right:project leadSebastian Krokiewicz,game/level designerKrzysztof Chomicki, composerCris Velasco,sound designerMaciej Niedzielski

How did you first meet with Sebastian and decide to form a studio?

We both got hired a couple of years ago by Transhuman Design. Its a company set up by Michal Marcinkowski. His studio is behind Soldat and Soldat 2, King Arthurs Gold, and Trench Run. He hired Sebastian for a particular project, which eventually got scrapped, but at the time Sebastian was working on his own game called Butcher, and Michal liked it enough to decide to produce it as Transhuman Design and publish it.

Eventually, they decided to expand the team behind Butcher. They were looking for a level designer, and thats how I got on board. At some point, Maciej joined the team as a composer. We liked working with each other so much that we decided to form our own studio, and thats how Phobia and the core team behind Carrion came to be.

Its been three weeks since you unleashed Carrion onto the world. Whats going on at the studio right now?

Weve just published a major patch, which is live on Steam and Xbox already. It should be live on Switch fairly soon. We are also thinking about some updates, like workshop support for the Steam version.

But mostly, we just want to get the post-release support done and maybe the PlayStation port and then to take some time off.

The last couple of weeks was pretty intense. Especially since it was a multi-platform release, which we didnt have previous experience with because Butcher was ported to consoles not by us, but by Crunching Koalas.

Just like Carrion, Butcher also had players kill people as an antagonistic entity, and it was a relative success. Does it mean that Carrion was a relatively low-risk project and you were confident that theres a demand for this formula?

Its not like we knew that a game about an amorphous meat blob would sell. When Sebastian started prototyping the monsters movement and eating mechanics, he shared some gifs on Twitter. They clicked incredibly well, especially compared to what we had with Butcher. Soon after this, publishers started approaching us and asking about the game. Yes, its still too early, they said. But once you have a vertical slice and some proper prototype demo, come back to us and well see what we can do.

Thats when we knew that theres definitely a potential in this project.

You said before that early in development, you used real-time feedback on Twitter to help shape Carrion. How did it work?

At first, we werent sure what kind of game we wanted to make, other than it being loosely inspired by The Thing (1982). We were just exploring the controls for this amorphous creature. We also had the general idea for the eating mechanic, which is that you grow larger and more powerful as you eat more people. And that was pretty much the only thing set in stone from the very beginning.

Everything else we experimented with, posting some gifs on Twitter, and whatever resonated best with people clued us in on which direction we should follow.

Does the player control just one monster? Should there be more monsters? Should we make it an RTS game, with you commanding multiple creatures?

Interestingly enough, we didnt implement any of the mechanics we were testing on Twitter. So, the core of the game has not changed since the very beginning. Twitter comments just validated our intuition, which led us to this kind of metroidvania-based exploration / puzzle platformer without platforming.

Carrions engine is built on the MonoGame framework. Would you please explain your choice of the tech behind the game?

Actually, Butcher, our previous game, was done in Unity. At the time we shipped Butcher and started looking into Carrion, Unity had its both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage was that you could get something up and running very quickly. However, optimizing it, finding bugs and general quirks of the engine wasnt that easy. I dont know if its still the case with the latest version.

For Butcher, Sebastian even developed his own 2D lighting system instead of using what Unity had built in. And it gave us a massive performance boost.

So Sebastian figured out that for the game to feel good on low-spec hardware, while having at least 60 FPS, with no frame drops, it would be easier for him to write something from scratch. He was doing it anyway. The engine was just giving us some unnecessary overhead.

Sebastian looked into MonoGame, liked it enough to decide to go with it, and we are pretty proud of how the game works on relatively crappy computers.

And there is also no fee for using MonoGame, which is always a bonus. I wouldnt, however, recommend building your own engine for everything. It requires a particular set of skills. Sebastian being a very talented programmer, it worked out pretty well in our case. But Im definitely not surprised that many teams are sticking with Unity, Unreal or GameMaker.

Unity and Unreal make most sense if you want realistic graphics. If you could have afforded it for Carrion, I wonder if you would have gone for the same level of gore and violence that you now have in the game?

To be honest, I dont think it would have worked with extremely realistic graphics. It wouldve lost a lot of its charm and even comedy. Carrion is one of those games that might act as if they are dead serious, but they arent. With all the screams and everything being so over the top, it works very well in the pixel art style.

And Im not sure it would be a good idea to do it either in high-def 2D or 3D. It would probably turn into an actual horror game, and we didnt want our game to be scary to the player. You are the one whos making NPCs scared, but you yourself should feel exhilarated running around as the monster. So I think this level of abstraction that pixel art gives us is very beneficial in this case.

Physics simulation creates all sorts of fun incidents, but it also takes away from the precision of controls. Like you try to gently close the door, but instead you rip it off! Or you occasionally expose one of your blobs. Did you struggle with that when designing the game?

90 or 95% of the monster is physics-based and procedurally generated. Theres a couple of sprites, like the mouths or the eyes. Obviously, it did pose some problems in terms of responsiveness. We did our best to give the players as much control over the creature as possible, given its nature. But its always a tradeoff.

There were also some quirks in level design. Especially with the monster in its largest form, we had to be very careful. For example, if you pull this switch and some door closes, it can cut you in half because some of your blobs just happened to be there, half a screen away. Things like that dont happen in other games with regular-sized characters, which only fit two tiles. It was pretty tough for us.

As for somewhat loose controls, I think it actually works pretty well onthe narrative level, because even if you want to remove a soldier or a scientist from a group and you just end up killing everybody, well, what can you do it? Just one of the disadvantages of being a monster, I suppose.

Yeah. Narratively and thematically, it fits, so its not a major problem. No ludo-narrative dissonance. Controls dont need to be uber-precise since the monster is kind of messy.

You could do a crossover between Butcher and Carrion. Combine two very different types of gameplay with the cyborg from Butcher being very precise and the monster being sloppy and messy.

That would not be impossible to doButImnot confirming any crossovers!A good point, though, about Butchers controls being very precise. In Butcher, we had pixel-perfect precision when it comes to movement. And all the arenas and the platforms were designed with extremely smooth and precise movement in mind. Carrion is the opposite because the monster isnt that precise and it doesnt even require any platforms because it can just go anywhere it wants.

Technology versus nature. Anyway, I also like how many of Carrions systems are interconnected. The roar button, for example, lets you roar, which is fun in itself. At the same time, it allows you to locate a savepoint. But it also alerts NPCs on the level, which you can tactically use. Did you specifically design stuff like that to serve multiple purposes? Or did it just organically come together as the game evolved?

I think its a bit of both, depending on which system we are talking about. Some things were planned and some just came naturally as the game was evolving.

We knew quite early on that wed lock particular skills into particular sizes of the monster. We call it the mass-based class system. This system allowed us to come up with more creative puzzles than in most metroidvanias, in which solving puzzles is just a matter of obtaining the right skill.

The mass-based class system also added more variety to combat because there isnt one single winning strategy for all encounters. Puzzles force you into changing your size so you have to constantly adjust your tactic.

Thats something we knew pretty much from the get-go and something that was entirely planned. Other things kind of evolved along the way, like the echolocation. Initially, it was just a roar button and it didnt have the echolocation functionality. Thats something that was added later on.

In general, we are big fans of things that serve multiple purposes and add some depth without adding unnecessary complexity. The fewer buttons to remember, the better.

What does it mean to create levels for a monster to navigate as opposed to those designed for humanoid characters?

Its just a nightmare in many ways. One thing you dont really think about is how important gravity is in most games, especially in action adventure platformers. Its pretty much the most common obstacle other than having to fight enemies or open doors. You have to get somewhere high or avoid falling down. Gravity is something you take for granted, and once you take it away from the game, suddenly you have to figure out a completely new way of setting up challenges, obstacles and puzzles for the monster.

Asthe monster, when you see some place, you can just go there by pointing your mouse or analogue stick. It really flipped everything on its head. We couldnt have actual outdoor segments because the monster could just go everywhere. So theres always a ceiling, even in the most outdoor-ish chambers. Obviously, its a lot of work.

And also the sheer speed at which the monster moves is a major problem for level design. In most games, half of the time you just walk from point A to point B. In Carrion, though, its a matter of seconds to go from the beginning of the map to the end, if there are no obstacles, no enemies. So we had to get very creative.

You may have noticed that in flashback sequences, when youre controlling the scientists, their movement is totally different, despite utilizing the same environments. A chamber that would take a second or two to traverse as the monster takes you half a minute to get through. So it amplifies the sense of what the monster is capable of and how frightening it is to the humans who move so slowly and are very limited in their traversal abilities.

So the metroidvania-like design was born out of your ambition to step up the challenge for the monster?

It wasnt so much about upping the difficulty. We just wanted to give the game more depth, boost its exploration aspect. As soon as we figured that throughout the game the monster would be learning new skills that it could use to unlock new areas, to solve puzzles, it was just our natural instinct to go for a more or less metroidvania-like approach. Although its not really your ordinary metroidvania with everything respawning everywhereand every puzzle being extremely simple. We didnt want to respawn every single object in the environment. We wanted to maintain this feeling of the horror that the monster is bringing on humans, so you need to see your havoc. Everything that you broke, everyone you killed and everybody you spared stays there for the whole game.

So despite Carrion having those core principles of metroidvania (not being able to go there yet, first needing to acquire the new skill), we kind of streamlined it. You dont have to do an awful lot of backtracking in our game. Which is why, once you enter a new area, its locked off, and you are restricted to this contained area you have to work through. It lessens the confusion because it helps avoid situations in which someone would approach a puzzle and start wondering whether they can solve that puzzle or not yet. Because sometimes you backtrack to the very beginning even though you were actually able to solve this or that puzzle. It was just a matter of coming up with the right solution.

I did get lost a couple of times exploring the dungeons. And apparently, other people did. I saw folks posting their maps of the facility on Reddit to help their fellow players. In retrospect, do you feel like an in-game map might have been a good idea?

Im fairly confident that some reviewers would have given us higher scores, if there was an in-game map. I still think it would really detract from the experience. It would make the game genuinely worse. Its like with Demons Souls and Dark Souls, those games being vastly misunderstood at first by the majority of reviewers. Especially Demons Souls didnt review all that well because the game didnt explicitly tell you what to do. Those games didnt have any maps. But eventually a few people figured out what those games were about. They were just hearkening back to times when games respected the player a bit more and didnt do any kind of handholding.

In fact, you still have this conversation going on 10 years later, like should Sekiro have an easy mode? No, it shouldnt.

And I think its kind of similar with Carrion. Games nowadays make people expect a map to guide you everywhere, even if its not really necessary. Players are so used to having a map that they stop paying attention to environmental clues or directions that the game gives them.

The original Metroid didnt have a map and it was totally fine and nobody complained. Back in the day, even games that did have maps still required you to pay attention to the environment. In Morrowind, for example, the quest log only gave you the general directions, like go North, find this rock, and then turn right and hope for the best. Its something that Oblivion totally ruined for me. It just points you in the right direction or you can simply fast-travel, theres barely any sense of exploration and discovery in post-Oblivion RPGs. If more developers decided to focus on just environmental clues, people would stop expecting to have the map available at all times.

Im very happy, though, that people are making their own maps to help each other, it strengthens the community.

Both Butcher and Carrion allow users to integrate their own custom levels. Is it a feature that you consciously put in your games?

In the case of Butcher, we used our own in-game level editor while making the game. It was relatively easy to adapt it to the general public. We just figured, why not? Anyway, it wasnt very popular with fans, even though some people did make maps. And in the case of Carrion, its actually the total opposite. This time, we used a third party tool called Tiled, which is a map editor used in various games. Once we posted the alpha sneak peek demo back in October last year, someone asked what we were using for editing levels. When I told them it was Tiled, people started coming up with their own maps, using the demo assets. We didnt lock any functionalities away from people. People are still making maps. The most dedicated modder in our community has already made a custom campaign, which should take around two hours to beat or so, and its very cool. So its something we want to capitalize on, which is why were looking into the workshop support, as I mentioned.

We definitely want to make creating and downloading custom maps easier. Its not so hard right now, you need to download a level file and the script file and put them in the corresponding folders. But nowadays its expectedthateverything should be just a single click away, so were looking into our options in making the whole experience smoother.

A couple of words about music and sound design. How did it feel for you guys to work with Cris Velasco?

It was great. Cris did music for Overwatch, Mass Effect, Borderlands, God of War, Resident Evil 7, and Bloodborne. What he brought to the table is the sheer knowledge of working on those AAA titles. In fact, we wanted to orchestrate the whole soundtrack. We pretty much had everything set up for an actual orchestra recording. But the pandemic messed up our plans and we ended up recording soloists only a violinist and a cellist.

Funnily enough, it was Cris who approached us after seeing some of our gifs on Twitter. He found Sebastian on FB and said he would like to write the soundtrack for Carrion. After seeing his portfolio, we obviously decided to let him!

When the credit rolled, I counted 16 voice actors in the game without a line of dialogue. How come?

Its all screams. We told our sound designer Maciej that theres a limit on every sound. Theres only this many sounds for door breaking, wood cracking or the monster roaring. But there was one sound that didnt have a limit on the quantity and variety of it. It was screaming. We wanted to have as many screams as possible. When we revealed the game at an E3, we didnt have all those recorded yet, and people actually complained about having to listen to the same samples over and over again. Its something we went all in on.

Finally, any words of wisdom to your fellow devs?

Never make games in which the character is amorphous and you never know how large and how long it gets. Stick to your fixed-sized character. Its for your own sanity.

***

You mignt wantto check out the extended video version of the interview with Krzysztof:

Read more:
Carrion game/level designer Krzysztof Chomicki on managing amorphousness, gravity and screams - Game World Observer

A paper published recently in the Journal of Medical Ethics explores the relationship between disability and enhancement, and the importance of social context and environment in how they get defined. According to the group of authors, led by Nicholas Greig Evans, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, the most popular ways of thinking about disability and impairment often either discount certain types of disability or patronize the person with the impairment.

Going further, the authors explain how popular accounts tend to ignore how social stereotypes about disability can impact even those who do not identify as disabled or impaired themselves:

the tendency to focus on specific and often paradigmatic cases of disability and elide discussion of enhancement has a serious downside: it has the potential, among other things, to keep us from understanding cases of disability and impairment that are less apparent and well recognized. Aside from limiting our knowledge and understanding, it also keeps us from making interventions or undertaking further research that might concretely assist those populations . . .

There have been many different models of disability proposed over time, ranging from models based on social factors and human rights to those that link disability to technology. Recent events, like the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated economic and climate disasters, moreover, serve as ongoing reminders of how our abilities to act freely as individuals are always shaped by the broader socioeconomic dimensions of our lives. This insight echoes what critical psychologists have been saying for decades.

According to Evans and the other authors, most people thinking seriously about these issues agree that disability is a widely heterogeneous set of phenomena, so much so, they note that some have argued it to be a meaningless category in the abstract. For them, most existing models dont account for the way assumptions about disability are intertwined with assumptions about enhancement, insofar as both are shaped by which skills happen to be considered most valuable in a given social setting.

How we define either disability or enhancement, they propose, depends on how we compare the behaviors of a specific individual with a statistically relevant cohort group. Cohort group studies track changes in behavior and expressed capacities over time across individuals who live under similar conditions.

With this in mind, the authors suggest it could be useful to think about human abilities in general in terms of the concept of capacity space, which they define as the dynamic relationship between an individual person and their social and environmental milieu. From this perspective, phenomena we tend to call disability are inherently dynamic because they change over time, and they are relational because they are constituted through interactions between persons and the social tools (e.g., digital technology) they have available.

The concept of capacity space, the authors propose, provides a useful starting point for understanding the full variability and breadth of disability as a ubiquitous characteristic of the human species. To help illustrate this, they present a series of case studies that depict experiences of disability and enhancement that are often overlooked in the literature.

For example, they point to certain dysgenic effects in soldiers after WWI, where a high number of casualties left young men who were previously considered physically unfit among the only individuals available for military service.

In this instance, individuals who had been considered disabled relative to other soldiers before the war could have become normal, or even enhanced, simply because the cohort group against which they were judged had changed. This, the authors explain, is an example of how ones capacity space can be transformed even when ones individual abilities remain relatively consistent.

Another example they discuss is the many different variations of chronic pain. This is true both within the same individual as well as across different individuals. Some days are, of course, better than others, with factors ranging from diet, climate, and social contact, possibly having some effect on how chronic pain is experienced and managed at any given time.

Symptoms related to a diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), a hypermobility condition, for instance, might be relatively mild when compared to other individuals who are diagnosed with the same condition:

At times, the person is simply more flexible and mobile than their cohort, making them a better spokesperson. At other times, their joints dislocate unexpectedly, and they are incapacitated in significant ways. Is this person enhanced, disabled, or both, relative to their cohort?

Thinking about disability as something that any human can experience under the right set of conditions, and in entirely personal ways, represents a clear departure from approaches like welfarism, which posits a clearly defined line between disability and ability.

The authors define welfarist approaches to disability as those that posit a stable physiological or psychological property of a subject S that leads to a significant reduction of Ss level of well-being in some circumstance. From this perspective, disability is defined not according to how an individual can perform socially, but according to how the individuals sense of well-being is impacted by one of their personal traits.

Enhancement, by contrast, would be defined under welfarism by any stable property of a person that leads to a significant increase in that persons well-being. By focusing on psychological well-being, rather than social structures or medical status, the authors suggest, welfarist approaches to disability and enhancement account for something important that other models tend to ignore.

And yet, by framing disability as something intrinsic to each individual person, and defining welfare solely in terms of well-being, welfarist accounts risk marginalizing the consequences of prejudice and institutional discrimination for those who do not conform to conventional social expectations. They also fail to adequately account for the ways disabilities have different social implications across time and space, beyond individual well-being.

Such dimensions, the authors claim, are essential to experiences of disability. With their concept of capacity space, they underscore how time and space are not abstract categories; like disability itself, they are complex social realities that shape what individuals consider possible for themselves and others.

The authors are also cautious not to discount sociohistorical accounts of disability. Instead, they describe their project as complementary to such accounts. And yet, the importance of economics and social factors related to race and gender are given relatively little attention in their article.

It is hard to imagine how a cohort, or any other social group, for that matter, could be considered relevant to a persons lived-experience without accounting for the way self-image and self-performance are assigned value today largely in terms of capital.

Under current conditions of global capitalism, social networks are unavoidably shaped by the technologies, information, and capital that its members have access to. Indeed, enhancement and technology are so obviously linked in todays hyperconnected world that it would make little sense to propose a concept of one that cannot account for the other.

While statisticians have the luxury of selecting cohort groups based on analytic convenience, this is not true for those whose embodied natures fail to align with the skills deemed most valuable in todays information-based markets. These are issues that movements like transhumanism and posthumanism have been engaging with for decades, but they are, unfortunately, not given much attention by the authors of this paper.

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Evans, N. G., Reynolds, J. M., & Johnson, K. R. (2020). Moving through capacity space: Mapping disability and enhancement. Journal of Medical Ethics. (Link)

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Rethinking Our Concepts of Disability to Meet Our Changing Social Worlds - James Moore