Improvising Race: Clinical Trials and Racial Classification

Racial improvisation, as a concept and framework, is based on the idea that race is unstable and inconsistent (Abu El-Haj Citation2007; Anand Citation1999; Marshall Citation1993). To illuminate the mercuriality of race, I focus on processes of improvisation. For instance, how do ethnicity codes generate the improvisation of race in practice?

The juxtaposition of both classification systems, the Borges list and the ethnicity list #1–10, makes the ethnicity code from the UK trial appear silly or out of context. Making something like the ethnicity code seem strange is an anthropological endeavor into the implicit politics of classifications and hierarchies that are not explicit when used in what might be considered a “proper” context. Whereas Borges’ list was intentionally exaggerated to make a point about the arbitrariness of classification systems, the classification list from the StandUP clinical trial in the United Kingdom was intended to order ethnicities for the production of scientific knowledge.

The improvisation of race is a window into the movements, negotiations and temporality of racialization in clinical practice. By conceiving race as mercurial, I argue that improvisation is a key mechanism for the routinization of racial categories in clinical practice.

Having immersed myself in these movies and the technologies that inspire them, it’s clear that, if we want to ensure these trends don’t cause more problems than they resolve, we desperately need the perspectives that movies like Ghost in the Shell and others reveal. The alternative is risking losing our own “ghosts” in the drive to innovate bigger and better, without thinking about the consequences.

Yet as the narrative unfolds, we learn that this is not a person, but an AI developed by US security services that has escaped the leash of its handlers.

In 2012, the South African athlete Oscar Pistorius made history by being the first runner to compete in the Olympic Games with two prosthetic legs. His iconic racing blades came to represent the promise of technological enhancements to overcome human limitations. Yet they stirred up fears of them giving him an unfair advantage that led to him being barred from competing in the previous Olympics. The same year that Pistorius successfully competed in the Olympics, the Canadian researcher Steve Mann was allegedly assaulted because his computer-augmented eye extension offended someone. And in 2015, patient-advocate Hugo Campos discovered he didn’t legally have access to the implanted defibrillator that kept him alive. These are all relatively small examples of the tension that’s growing between conventional thinking and human augmentation. But they illustrate how the angst that Kusanagi feels about her augmented body, and how it defines her, is already part of today’s society. And we’ve barely touched the tip of this particular iceberg.

Throughout Ghost, Major Kusanagi is plagued by doubts of who she is. Do her cybernetic augmentations make her less human, or having less worth? Is her sense of self—her “ghost”—simply an illusion of her machine programming? And what autonomy does she have when she malfunctions, or needs an upgrade? These are questions that are already beginning to tax developers and others in the real world. And as robotic and cyber technologies become increasingly advanced, they are only going to become harder to navigate.

Inspired by the neural laces of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, and echoing Ghost, Musk announced on Twitter that, in his opinion, “Creating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines.”

doldrums

When the anime movie Ghost in the Shell was released in 1995, the world wide web was still little more than a novelty, Microsoft was just beginning to find its GUI-feet, and artificial intelligence research was in the

This is the purpose of ethically appropriate research with careful oversight. The ban does not change the need for discussion. If anything, it brings the debate back to the reality of patients seeking care for diseases that currently have no cure.

These editing therapies will permanently change all the descendants of a couple. In some cases it could rid a family of a genetic disease. In others, the unintended effects may be worse than the disease itself.

The technology is here, but we know so much less about its effects than we should.

These traits are often the product of multiple genes working in tandem. The products of these genes work together throughout our lives, which makes the impact of editing at the embryonic level impossible to predict.

heritable genetic modification