Date: Jan 11, 2024 (Thursday)
Time: 7:00pm - 9:30pm
Venue: Lumina College
Language: Cantonese (Supplemented by English materials)
Free of charge and welcome donations
About the speaker：
Dr. Pak Nung Wong (D.Phil, Oxon) is a Christian futurist who currently teaches politics and international relations at the University of Bath, U.K. He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Bandung: Journal of the Global South (Brill). Apart from being awarded millions of dollars of research and educational partnership funding, he was offered prestigious chairs in political science and R&D by the talents schemes of Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, and Taiwan’s Ministry of Education. His books include Techno-Geopolitics: U.S.-China Tech War and the Practice of Digital Statecraft (Routledge 2022), and Logic of Powers: Towards an Impact-driven Practice of Futurist Statecraft (Routledge 2022). He is working on a few book projects, including Decolonizing Global Intelligence: Towards Anticipatory Futures and Inclusive Interstellar Statecraft.
Introduction︰
The neuronal revolution entails a series of scientific discoveries in the cross-disciplinary field of neuro-biotechnology, cutting across neuroscience, psychiatry, artificial intelligence (AI), genetics, medicine, robotics and synthetic biology. Neurons are believed to be the basis of human will and vector of representation of conceptual knowledge.
In this seminar, our speaker will compare three selected neuro-biotechnological advances for illustrating a new form of agency – the ‘augmented agency’: (1) human-animal chimera, (2) insect-robotics, and (3) brain-machine interface. Under the neuronal revolution, the conventional notion of human agency was reduced to circuits of neuronal electro-impulses, which enable a person to feel in control, believe in having free will and independent thinking. The augmented agency enables human consciousness to be constituted, altered, and enhanced by external devices, non-invasive and surgical techniques, psychedelic medicine, therapeutic interventions and assisted technologies, which include brain-AI convergence, cerebral-information interaction, memory editing/deletion/inception, and implantation of insect/animal/reptile neurons.
Using futures intelligence techniques and departing from Christian futurism, our speaker shall outline an anticipatory methodology for strategic planning in order to prepare for various future scenarios against the larger projects of decolonization and interstellar political economy.
Lumina College is a Christian higher education institute that inspires people to think deeply and lead faithfully in the world. Through faith-based postgraduate programs, staff development, and social education, Lumina equips believers to discover God's world in light of God's Word. Lumina College was founded in 2015 with the vision of cultivating contemporary leaders with Christian worldviews.