George Dvorsky

Who is George Dvorsky?

George P. Dvorsky is a Canadian bioethicist, transhumanist, and futurist. He is a contributing editor at io9 and producer of the Sentient Developments blog and podcast. Dvorsky currently serves as Chair of the Board for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the founder and chair of the IEET's Rights of Non-Human Persons Program, a group that is working to secure human-equivalent rights and protections for highly sapient animals.

Dvorsky is a secular Buddhist, progressive environmentalist, ancestral health advocate, and animal rights activist. Primarily concerned with the ethical and sociological impacts of emerging technologies, specifically, "human enhancement" technologies; he seeks to promote open discussion for the purposes of education and foresight. He writes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including technoscience, ethics, existential risks, artificial intelligence, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and futurology, from a democratic transhumanist perspective.

Dvorsky presented an argument for non-human animal biological uplift at the IEET Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights conference at Stanford University in May 2006; and wrote the first published article in defence of the Ashley Treatment in November 2006, and subsequently the only bioethicist cited by Ashley X's parents in their defense. Dvorsky also presented an argument warning of the decline of democratic values and institutions in the face of existential and catastrophic risks at the Global Catastrophic Risks: Building a Resilient Civilization conference in November 2008.