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This paper aims to focus on the modern development of bionics and linking new technologies with the human nervous system or other biological systems that cause changes of the human biological structure.

The paper is a discursive evaluation of technological progress and new systems where computers and machines integrate, making a single matrix entity – the cyborg. Here fundamental questions arise, such as what it means to be human and what is (descriptive aspect) and what should be (normative aspect) a human being?

The paper argues for the value of twenty-first century human enhancement techniques and other emerging technologies that promised to “help” humans become “more than human”, trying to create human beings with greatly enhanced abilities, to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. Modern man is gradually disappearing as a natural being and increasingly turning into an artificial creature “cyborg” that leads into the question, what will ultimately remain human in a human body?

The paper contributes to the existing debates about further development of cyborgisation and examines boundaries that will strictly divide man from a cyborg in the near future. In order to protect man from the omnipotence of technology and its unethical application is necessary to establish cyborgoethics that would determine the implementation of an artificial boundary in the natural body.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework that highlights transhumanism’s ideals of achieving superintelligence, super longevity and super well-being through human enhancement technologies (HET) and their relations with services marketing principles.

Framed by the transformative service research (TSR), this conceptual work articulates the 7Ps of the marketing mix with four macro-factors that create tensions at both the marketplace and consumer levels.

HET has potential for doing good but also tremendous bad; greater attention is needed from services marketing researchers especially in one proprietary research area: bioethics.

The authors contribute to the growing work on TSR investigating how the interplay between service providers and consumers affects the well-being of both. Additionally, the authors call for novel interdisciplinary work in transhuman services research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first papers in services marketing research to explore the promises and perils of transhumanism ideals and human enhancement technologies.

The paper shows that current research systems are not geared to organise and evaluate research involving several scientific disciplines. A consequence is exaggerated promises and expectations based on “speculative interdisciplinarity”. These expectations are one cause of “speculative ethics”. Evaluators of interdisciplinary research proposals should be aware of the pitfalls existing in this kind of research. The purpose of this paper is to highlight “speculative interdisciplinarity” as a cause of exaggerated expectations with the result that ethical analysis and similar activities focus on unlikely impacts.

The paper confronts documented statements of champions of emerging technologies with assessments by specialists from the scientific disciplines involved in the development of the technologies and examines the extent to which differences are due to problems with interdisciplinary work.

The paper identifies the causes of exaggerated expectations related to the impact of emerging technologies based on interdisciplinary research. Lack of experience with interdisciplinary research is shown to be a major cause.

This is basically a case study for a spectacular individual example. There is a need to show that the same problems exist for less spectacular scientific endeavours.

Review process organisers and reviewers should be aware that exaggerated expectations can arise as a result of insufficient attention to the organisation of interdisciplinary research. There is a need for studies to confront expectations with the genuine state of research.

The paper highlights a need to pay attention to the organisation of interdisciplinary research.

Technology is one of the crucial topics for the understanding of the content and meaning of creativity in management. More than ever knowledge and science determine technology and in turn technology determines the economy and management. The range of necessary creativity therefore risks to be highly determined by the evolution of technology. This will bring us to the crucial question whether in the future the diffusion of creativity is still possible when human-made environments are more and more determined by technology. Opdebeeck argues that the question about transhumanism and posthumanism on the relationship between technology and the enhancement of the human person is crucial for humanity and nature as well. With Jurgen Habermas he states that the problem is not modern science and technology per se, but the fact that the reified models of the science and technology migrate into the management life-world and gain power over our self-understanding. The solution must, therefore, rather be sought in keeping the distinction between the sphere of science and technology and the sphere of the human person.

The paper aims to explore the sided challenges facing the accounting profession in an advanced digitalised future where humans and robots will collaborate in working teams.

Employing a qualitative approach, the paper conducts a reflexive thematic analysis to identify challenges and associated socio-ethical risks of digitalisation; it then introduces an ethical decision-making model aimed at addressing these challenges.

Key professional accountants’ (PAs) sided challenges refer to autonomy, privacy, balance of power, security, human dignity, non-maleficence and justice, each of them possessing multifaceted dimensions that are interconnected dynamically to create a complex web of socio-ethical risks.

The ethical decision-making pathways corresponding to each detected challenges provide a useful reference and guideline for PAs in the digitalised future of the profession.

Using an anthropocentric perspective, the research addresses the sided challenges of accounting profession’s accelerated digitalisation; it contributes to fostering accountability and legitimacy of the accounting profession which serves the public interest.

By innovatively intertwining ethical positions with decision-making pathways, the paper offers a potential solution to address digitalisation’s sided challenges that might interfere with practitioners’ professional judgement and identity.

Exoskeletons are characterized as wearable, mechanical orthoses that augment the physical performance of the wearer, enhance productivity and employee well-being when used in value producing contexts. However, limited research involving exoskeleton usage by service employees in frontline contexts has been undertaken within service research. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of exoskeleton research undertaken within the context of value-producing roles, introduce exoskeletons conceptually to the service research domain, provide new conceptualizations of service exchange interactions involving physically augmented service actors and propose future avenues of exoskeleton research in alignment with key service theories.

A multi-disciplinary structured literature review based on the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses method was undertaken across a variety of literature fields. A final selection of n = 25 papers was selected for analysis from an initial sample of N = 3,537. Given the emergent nature of exoskeleton research and the variety of methodology types used between literature fields, a thematic analysis approach was used for analysing identified papers.

The literature review identified four main themes within role-focused exoskeleton research. These themes informed proposals for future exoskeleton research with respect to key service theories and typologies. The findings demonstrate that the presence of an exoskeleton changes the behaviours and interactions of service employees. The augmented social presence AugSP typology is conceptualized to explain the influences of human enhancement technologies (HETs) within service actor interactions.

This research introduces the AugSP typology to conceptualize the impacts that exoskeletons and HETs impose within technologically mediated service interactions and provides a service-specific definition of exoskeleton technology to guide future service research involving the technology.

While transhumanists and posthumanists understand the human condition as mutable, for transhumanists, this represents the possibility for enhancement, opening up a teleological narrative of evolution toward. For posthumanists, it represents a fracturing of the liberal human subject, undermining its hegemonic principles. The former advocates the potentiality of instrumental rationality, the latter engages with values, demanding ethical consideration of the implications of the unmooring. This paper aims to conceive of a way to underpin posthumanist thought to enable to serve a more effective critique of transhumanist aims.

This is a theoretical paper that outlines a history of transhumanist thought and the roots of posthumanism. It provides a partially reconstructed enlightenment humanist framework to bolster the effectiveness of posthumanism as a critique of transhumanist thought.

The paper recognizes Theodor Adorno's conception that the central contradiction inherent to enlightenment thinking is the entanglement of knowledge and power. Hence, the metanarrative of progress as historical fact is fundamentally imbued with an imperial, colonizing force. For reason to achieve its promise as the organ of progress, it must become self-aware of its own limitations and its own potential destructiveness. Humility is, thus, vital in the task of preventing instrumental reason leading to inhuman ends.

Whilst developments such as “metahumanism” attempt to bring “posthumanism” and “transhumanism” into direct conversation, it is done from the perspective of uniting their positions. Here, the author endeavors instead to consider their antithetical nature and in particular whether posthumanism can provide an effective critique of transhumanism. Drawing on Adorno and Feenberg in particular, the author attempts to justify the posthuamanist theory but also to employ a partially reconstructed enlightenment humanism to bolster its fruitfulness as a critique of transhumanism.

Because information technology (IT) can change the way we look at the world, some benefits for human communities, such as trust, care, friendship and commitment can be clearly noticed as contributors to society. Providing an innovative way to help human society, enabling the achievement of good lives by evaluating information related to the concept of wisdom, this paper aims to propose technical guidelines as a reference model, specifically for empowering both professional and ethical bases associated with the instructional application strategy for adopting technology.

This study attempts to investigate the professional and ethical engagements that can underlie technology adoption. To achieve this, a literature review of peer-reviewed journals, conferences and books was conducted to propose the framework model for strengthening moral engagement in the digital era. By using keywords derived from the professional and ethical skills involved with technology adoption, multiple research findings can be achieved using meta-synthesis alongside an integrating, evaluating and interpreting process. As a result, phenomenological and grounded theories and ideas, extracted to identify their common features, elements and functionalities, can be integrated and used to propose a theoretical guideline.

The findings reveal that to engage the professional and ethical bases associated with the instructional strategy and application in technology adoption demonstrates how humans, with all their potency, can contribute significantly to society at large by enhancing their abilities and improving their capacities for the wise and appropriate utilization of technological tools.

With regard to experiences in the digital era, across differing cultures and age groups, based on emerging technology, it is necessary to use technological tools properly and wisely. An effort to foster positive outcomes as a result of increased digital media use, and address potential issues raised by empowering applications and strategies associated with professionalism and ethics, plays a significant role in contouring the main foundations for how to use technological tools in all the comprehensive coverage concerning the theory and applications addressed by this work.

What is significant and essential about the technological bases examined is their core element of enabling humans to enhance any benefits garnered for social and personal development. This paper intends to expand upon how professional and ethical aspects of technology adoption should involve a wide exchange of particular elements that underlie the wise and appropriate fostering of technological implementation.

Emerging technology with its distinct facilities could enhance individual performance by improving abilities and capacities for wise and appropriate operation of technological tools. By critically exploring the professional and ethical balance involved with technology-based tools in society and how they might underpin their users’ social and personal awareness, this paper gives feedback that provides insights about emerging technological trends. This is done with reference to particular guidelines, enabling a clearer understanding of the importance of the impact of technology on the human condition.

Neuroscience, with its promise to peer into the brain and explain the sources of human behavior and human consciousness, has captured the scientific, clinical, and public imaginations. Among those in the thrall of neuroscience are a group of ethicists who are carving out a new subspecialty within the field of bioethics: neuroethics. Neuroethics has taken as its task the policing of neuroscience. By virtue of its very existence, neuroethics presents a threat to its parent field bioethics. In its struggle to maintain authority as the guardian of neuroscience, neuroethics must respond to criticisms from bioethicists who see no need for the subspecialty. We describe the social history of neuroethics and use that history to consider several issues of concern to social scientists, including the social contexts that generate ethical questions and shape the way those questions are framed and answered; strategies used by neuroethicists to secure a place in an occupational structure that includes life scientists and other ethics experts; and the impact of the field of neuroethics on both the work of neuroscience and public perceptions of the value and danger of the science of the brain.

Media literacy education is knowingly contributed to give insights in facilitating the interaction and communication, and thus enabling to understand the way we look at the world around us. However, the challenging issues emerged around need to take serious consent towards engaging the professional and ethical balance in the context of application strategy on media literacy education. This paper attempts to examine in addressing the ability with substantial foundation to recognize and understand between its benefit and its impacts assigned with analysing and evaluating the media engagement.

This paper proposes the theoretical framework guideline with particular emphasis on empowering both professional and ethical dimensions relating to the media literacy and education to be keenly adhered to as a golden rule in media literacy, education and practice.

The findings reveal that such a marriage between the ethical dimensions and professional skills would promote the good of individuals, groups and broader society by addressing the inherent negative effects of media technology and practice. Consequently, the model would contribute to broader societal goodness and peaceful coexistence.

The professional and ethical balance being proposed here is necessary to reconsider the way and manner along with media technology tools utilized across different cultures with expressing the purpose of promoting appropriate and wise usage for the sustainable positive benefit of mankind at all times.