By By Pat Kane

I'm always keen to expand what we mean by play, moving beyond the usual Puritan cliches of triviality and frivolity. And the capacity of science to give us the power to play with matter and biology itself is one of the most urgent "ethical" issues of all.

There's a great play quote from novelist Margaret Atwood in the New York Review of Books (unfortunately, not free-to-web), reviewing Bill McKibben's intelligent-Luddite analysis, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (extract here). McKibben's argument is that our new disruptive technologies (bio-, info- and nano-tech) allow us too much power, over nature and ourselves. Do we really want to head towards immortality, for example, if these technologies allow it?

Atwood asks us to question whether all this intelligence is being properly applied:

There are some very clever people at work on the parts that will go into making up our immortality, and what they're doing is on some levels fascinating - like playing with the biggest toy box you've ever seen - but they are not the people who should be deciding our future. Asking these kinds of scientists what improved human nature is like is like asking ants what you should have in your backyard. Of course they would say, "more ants".

Of course, a novelist whose job it is to construct virtual human selves all day, and ultimately has the power to create or destroy her characters, is going to admit to a mild "fascination" with the "toy box" of bio-science. And though she is in agreement with McKibben - that "we can accept or reject technologies according to our social and spiritual criteria" (huge point) - she's "not too sure we'll do it".

Two other thinkers on "playing God with science" perhaps worth exploring, and from very different perspectives, are Robert Kegan and Bruno Latour.

Kegan, a Harvard psychologist says that our techno-scientific evolution far outstrips our mental evolution: thus, in the title of his book we are 'in over our heads' , subjectively drowning in the demands of life. How we close that gap and become, as Kagan puts it, "reconstructive post-modernists" - ie, big enough to 'play across' the various levels of our personal development - is his agenda. How do we attain the wisdom to deal with all this?

Bruno Latour, a French sociologist of science, has a more direct answer about who gets to "play God" with science: we all do. In the edition of Wired magazine edited by Rem Koolhaas , Latour proposes an update of the old US anti-colonialist slogan - 'Taxation without Representation is Tyranny'. His version is, 'Experimentation without Representation is Tyranny':

The sharp divide between a scientific inside, where experts are formulating theories, and a political outside, where nonexperts are getting by with human values, is evaporating. And the more it does, the more the fate of humans is linked to that of things, the more a scientific statement ("The Earth is warming") resembles a political one ("The Earth is warming!"). The matters of fact of science become matters of concern of politics...

Latour's aim is to extend the realm of players in science's future -"an imbroglio of spokespersons in a room". Will more voices improve our choices?