New Fields of Research Defined by Open Science Visionaries

The purpose of an open-science non-profit research startup like DIYgenomics is research innovation.

The value is in being able to propose a unique and visionary research agenda of questions that are forward-looking and not the focus or interest of the institutional research industry.

Research innovation falls into two tiers:

First is preventive medicine questions, ‘medicine that matters to me’ (e.g.; small groups or individuals), and non-pathologies.

More importantly, the second tier is defining completely new fields of research such as athletic performance genomics, social intelligence genomics, cognitive performance genomics, and DIYneuroscience, and making progress on widespread philosophical and societal problems such as the destigmatization of physical and mental health issues, and the reduction of discrimination as a broad social problem.

DIY open-science, crowdsourced health social networks, and community biohacking labs are the early-stage startup/venture capital arm of the expanding preventive medicine ecosystem of health services, and are able to surface projects of interest that can then be pursued at the institutional level as relevant.

Illiberty in Biohacking, Personal Data Rights, Neuro-diversity, and the Automation Economy

Illiberty is a new concept that describes the notion of a lack of liberty. In one way it is strange that a word for the opposite of liberty and freedom does not exist given how strongly these ideals feature in social, political, and cultural life. However, illiberty is quite subtle; it does not have the bluntness of the freedom-slavery opposition. Illiberty is the sense of a lack of liberty, particularly where there should be liberty. The justice-injustice pairing is similar to the liberty-illiberty relation.

As individuals, we continue to wake up to higher levels of consciousness in constituting ourselves as subjects, and now is the time to develop an awareness and response for new situations of illiberty.

Illiberty extends the familiar equity, social justice, privilege, and access struggles and covers a larger conceptual ground. Here are some new cases of illiberty, many of which we may be unaware: 

• Labor Rights: Mind liberation from working in the corporation, working for others
• Personal Data Rights: rights and responsibilities conferred upon personal data, especially big health science data streams: personal genome data, pacemaker data, biometric data, quantified self-tracking gadgetry data, neuro-data streams
• Citizen Scientist Rights: Non-institutional conduct of scientific research, biorights, biohacking, the biocitizen, community labs
• Neural Rights: Neurodiversity, ASD (autism spectrum disorder), introversion, mind emancipation 
• Economic Rights: Basic income guarantee (JET Vol 24, Issue 1), automation economy, post-scarcity economy
• Augmentation Rights: Rights and responsibilities of augmented persons

Illiberty Studies – Research Agenda 

1. Develop the illiberty concept drawing on: Derrida (democracy to come – inherent illiberty in the conceptualization of liberty), Rancière (emancipation), de Soto (responsibility-taking maturation), Dussel (liberty recast as liberation), Foucault (self-imposed disciplinary power) and Deleuze (micro-fascisms in one’s own thinking). 
2. Identify the conceptual shifts and argument structure in the historical development of equality philosophies (decolonialism, feminism, queer theory, transgender, marriage equality, neurodiversity, polyamory) 

Illiberty Working Group

Innovation in Epistemology

Rather than being a dusty old concept in philosophy, epistemology is a source of philosophical advance, and is perhaps shifting in some even more vibrant ways per the contemporary science and technology era of big data, information visualization, synthetic biology, biohacking, DIYscience, and the quantified self.

Epistemology (the study of knowledge) is one of the three main branches of philosophy, together with metaphysics (nature of reality), and aesthetics (nature of beauty). The study of knowledge remains one of the most dense and unresolved areas in philosophy. Some of the usual concerns of epistemology are: What is knowledge? How can knowledge be acquired? To what extent can any subject or entity be known? What are the limits of knowledge?

There are two main traditional theories as to how knowledge is obtained: either through the senses and perception (empiricism; e.g.; Locke’s “All ideas come from sensation”) or through reason (rationalism; e.g.; Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”).

There has been much movement in epistemology from the basic structure of this empiricism-rationalism debate. Both empiricism and rationalism seek common foundations upon which all other ideas are built (foundationalism). Foundationalism is problematic in several ways, two of the most basic are ‘what are these underlying foundations?’ and ‘how do these foundations connect to upstream ideas?’ Traditional/analytic philosophers propose coherentism as an alternative to foundationalism. Coherentism is the notion of it being more important that ideas make sense together and flow from one to the next than that they have immutable discernible foundations.

Continental philosophy too has a response to foundationalism and other aspects of the empiricst/rationalist debate. Gadamer enlarges the notion of epistemology, suggesting that discovering facts is just one of many edification activities; that man’s focus is self-betterment, a higher level than knowledge acquisition. Likewise Heidegger thinks that the higher-order engagement of man is beyond knowing facts and rather in understanding. Further that the circular structure of interpretation (the hermeneutic circle: acquiring new information and updating thoughts) is what makes knowledge possible. Rorty also calls for a larger, more holistic notion of epistemology that includes both conceptualization and the demonstration of practice.

Other new epistemologies also extend, reformulate and reinvigorate our understanding of epistemology and can be brought to bear on contemporary science and technology. Some of these alt.epistemologies are from the areas of social, feminist, queer, decolonial, and Eastern philosophy.

Top 10 Technology Tends for 2013

1. Big data ubiquity, along with machine learning algorithms, and information visualization
2. Video is the platform (example: individual YouTube channels with over 100,000 people making more than $10,000/year from ‘home video’ properties like My Drunk Kitchen, the ShayTards, and Right This Minute) 
3. Wearable computing and objective biometrics: Fitbit, myZeo, WiThings, smartwatch, smartring, wearable electronic patches and tattoos, Google’s Project Glass
4. Fracking
5. eHealth biohacking: Quantified Self-tracking, self-experimenting, group health collaboration, $99 personal genomics (23andMe), $99 personal microbiomics (American Gut Project), $5 home blood-test cards (Talking20) 
6. eLearning: Coursera, Udacity, edX, Class Central (MOOC aggregator)
7. Mobile is still the platform: worldwide smartphone adoption crosses 1 billion
8. Crowdsourced labor marketplaces: CrowdFlower, CrowdSource, oDesk, ClickWorker, Mechanical Turk, mobileworks, TopCoder, Elance, vWorker/Rent a Coder, Guru, 99designs, crowdSPRING, CloudCrowd, Soylent, microtask, LiveOps, Gigwalk
9. Computer security: increasing power of Internet-based activist hacking groups (e.g.; Anonymous)
10. New economic models (crowd-based): crowdfunding (Kickstarter, indiegogo, etc.), sustainable business, and crowdfunded debt forgiveness (from the Occupy movement’s financial arm: Rolling Jubilee)

Up and coming: Consumer EEG rigs wearable 24/7 (Axio, Interaxon) and attendant neural and biometric data privacy rights, ideally sans Faraday Cage 2.0

Still waiting for: nanotech, 3D printing, eHealth data commons with public longitudinal phenotypic data sets

Predictions for 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009