Australian prof Roger Clarke says that cyborg rights need to be debated now; Cyborgs are alive and well today and asserting their rights, presenting society with a challenge that needs to be met head on:

Dr Clarke says as cyborgisation is increasingly used in the medical arena, people may expect they have the right to have technology that keeps them alive.

"They may also want the right to have the technology removed when they want to die", he said.

In summary, says Dr Clarke, cyborgisation of humans is leading to a plethora of questions about human rights.

"People who are using prostheses to recover lost capabilities will seek to protect their existing rights. People who have lost capabilities but have not yet got the relevant prostheses will seek the right to have them," Dr Clark said.

"Enhanced humans will seek additional rights to go with the additional capabilities that they have."

Dr Clarke says engineers and others who develop these new technologies have an obligation to brief political, social and economic institutions on their implications.

"They have to date signally failed to do so, and urgent action is needed," Dr Clarke said.

"The need for policymakers to wake up to themselves and get debating things is becoming more acute."

Enthusiasts are building machines that can make just about anything – including their own robotic offspring. New Scientist explains:

Still, ingenious as these machines are, they merely churn out piles of parts. What about assembly? A heap of plastic and metal is not a machine, just as you don't have much in common with a pile of flesh and bones.

Greg Chirikjian, a roboticist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, agrees. "When a prototype only makes parts, the machine that made those parts wasn't reproduced," he says. A true self-replicator must handle both fabrication and assembly. Chirikjian and his colleague Matt Moses are aiming to achieve this with a kind of Lego set that doesn't need anyone to play with it.

The pair have already demonstrated key parts of such a system, using around 100 plastic blocks. Although it cannot yet fabricate these blocks itself, the machine is able to move in 3D to pick up and bind them into larger structures. Moses is currently working on having it make a complete replica of its own structure using Lego-like bricks, though the machine still relies on conventional motors - which have to be installed by hand - to drive its activity.

Time Magazine on the potential for artificial meat.

Excerpt:

What has confounded fake-meat producers for years is the texture problem. Before an animal is killed, its flesh essentially marinates, for all the years that the animal lives, in the rich biological stew that we call blood: a fecund bath of oxygen, hormones, sugars and plasma. Vegan foods like tofu, tempeh (fermented soy) and seitan (wheat gluten) don't have the benefit of sloshing around in something so complex as blood before they go onto your plate. So how do you create fleshy, muscley texture without blood?

Philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer asks, is a world with people in it better than one without?

Excerpt:

Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?

I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now. But justifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?