Inovação, Tecnologia e Transformação | Centro de Estudos de Bioética

Innovation, Technology and Transformation

The Innovation, Technology & Transformation group investigates the ethical, social, and human impacts of disruptive technologies, including biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and NBIC convergence. It analyzes topics such as transhumanism, human enhancement, synthetic organisms, regulation, safe use, sustainability, and equitable access to innovation, seeking to balance scientific progress, bioethical responsibility, and the protection of vulnerable populations.

A necessary review of Brazilian legal education: reflections on academic processes in the face of the reality of generative artificial intelligence.

Brazilian legal education faces the challenge of integrating generative artificial intelligence without abandoning critical thinking, ethics, and humanistic training. More than adopting tools, it must prepare jurists to understand, regulate, and question the technology already transforming law.

May 1525 min read

Five beneficences for a post-biological era

Post-biological beneficence does not grant moral status to every machine. Instead, it proposes a bioethics capable of addressing non-biological systems that already shape human life, agency and vulnerability. From instrumental benefit to artificial relationships, critical infrastructures, autonomous agency and possible artificial welfare, bioethics must guide technology before harms become irreversible.

May 1516 min read

Listening to Control? AI, Biosecurity, and the New Limits of Physiological Surveillance

When ordinary physiological signals, such as coughing, are analysed by AI, public health moves closer to security, surveillance, and institutional control. The bioethical question is no longer simply whether the technology works, but who is allowed to listen to the body, interpret its signals, and act upon them.

May 139 min read

Autonomous Weapons Systems and Bioethics

Attack drones, autonomy and lethal decision-making: the Portuguese case and the ethical limits of technological warfare.

Loitering munitions make a decisive tension visible: technology can increase precision, but it can also distance the human agent from the moral decision to kill. The ethical question is not merely whether the weapon is effective or legal, but whether it preserves real human judgment, clear responsibility, and democratic limits on lethal force.

May 118 min read

Medical AI, clinical decision-making, and patient autonomy: from assisted decision-making to algorithmic co-clinic.

Medical AI is no longer merely a support tool: it is beginning to become a third presence in the consultation. Between doctor, patient, and algorithmic co-clinician, autonomy requires more than consent. It requires understanding, contestation, alternatives, and human responsibility, so that the patient remains the author of the decision affecting their health, body, and future.

May 910 min read

Health data, privacy, and consent: the autonomy lost when data starts circulating.

Health data are not merely information: they are sensitive fragments of the person. Their secondary use can improve research, public policy, and clinical innovation, but it requires privacy, understandable consent, fiduciary governance, and continuous transparency. Without post-consent autonomy, technical data protection may coexist with the ethical loss of the person.

Apr 3011 min read