Teme has a friend in the Hastings Center. I am excited about this project, given its primary focus on encouraging dialogue and repect for for conflicting viewpoints. Teme provides technologies enabling both proactionary and precautionary undergraduates to advance information science.
I am a huge fan of open communication. We can certainly harm each other with our words, in obvious ways like slander or ad hominem or more insidious ways like noise pollution. The Internet provides ample opportunity for us to manage these harms, so it's generally a great idea to speak openly and apply a pallet of filters to flexibly and dynamically organize what are often irreducibly complex and exclusive ideas about our future and our relationship with technology.
I remain, however, a skeptic. On some ethical issues I remain hesitant to embrace openness. While it's likely openness may be a reasonable absolutist approach to working out our technoethics, knowledge itself is a form of capital that can be utilized with either social or material capital to achieve power. Synthetic biology is an incredibly high-stakes game, easily offering non-negligible existential threats in the next decade. Openness does not necessarily ensure adoption, and some forms of knowledge, when combined with technology, may enable irreversible power assymetries if only partially adopted.
Even in dialogue, I encourage both action and caution.