My daughter is 10. Fast-forward 25 years, and she is having her first child. She did pre-implementation genetic diagnosis, and she and her husband had some agonising days deciding on whether to modify a genetic predisposition to depression and whether to splice in a gene for enhanced intelligence. In the end, they felt they had no option but to give their baby the best possible start in life.
Five years later, my granddaughter is starting school. Again her parents have talked over the pros and cons of cognitive enhancement. A pharmcogenetic package is routinely offered on the state medical system after the government decided that there was no option but to ensure the nation’s schoolchildren had better powers of memory and concentration.
My daughter, meanwhile, has been very tired trying to hold down her job and be a mum, and she’s come under a lot of pressure from her boss to get help. What they mean is that she should go on to Provigil. If she was taking it, she could miss nights of sleep without any problem. Her colleagues call her a bio-Luddite for refusing.
The other thing that concerns us is that many of the children in my grandchild’s school have had much better enhancement programmes. I can see that my grandchild is never going to keep up. At the moment, she doesn’t mind that she’s bottom of her class, but she’ll be lucky to get to a good university. The one hope I’ve got is that they might introduce quotas for ”naturals” or ”near-naturals” like her.
Sound far-fetched? It’s anything but. This is the most conservative of a range of scenarios about the possibilities of ”human enhancement” that have prompted fierce debate around the world. The pace of development in four disciplines — neuroscience, biotechnology, computing and nanoscience — is such that many envisage dramatic breakthroughs in how we can modify ourselves, our physical and mental capabilities. We could live longer and be much stronger and cleverer — even be much happier. A whole new meaning to ”Be all you can be.”
Washington Post journalist and author of Radical Evolution Joel Garreau argues that we are at a pivotal point in human development. Having directed our technological ingenuity on the world around us, humans are now turning it on to their bodies and minds.
To the real enthusiasts — they call themselves transhumanists — humanity is on the point of being liberated from its biology. They believe that humans are on the brink of a huge leap in development, leaving behind the sick, weak, fallible creatures we have been up to now. We will be, as their slogan goes, ”better than well”.
This is the prospect that horrifies the so-called ”bio-conservatives” such as Francis Fukuyama, who argues that transhumanism is the most dangerous ideology of our time. There are plenty who share his concerns, pointing out that the implications for human rights, indeed for our understanding of what it is to be human, are huge. What place will equality have in this brave new world? What place will privacy have when brain imaging can read our thoughts and transcranial magnetic stimulation can manipulate them? What powers over our brains will the state demand in the war against terror?
It’s time we got our heads around this debate so that we can influence what technologies are developed, rather than leaving it to the scientists and the pharmaceutical and military interests who sponsor their research.
These are not radical new steps, only an acceleration of existing trends. For example, if you can have Viagra for an enhanced sexual life, why not a Viagra for the mind? Is there a meaningful difference? As computers continue to increase in power and shrink in size, why shouldn’t we use them as prostheses, an artificial limb for the brain?
There’s no stop button available. Much of the research that could be ultimately used for human enhancement is urgently needed to counter such neuro-degenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s. But it’s all too possible to envisage how fast, in a competitive, unequal world, we could hurtle towards horrible futures. The one I outlined above was the most benign I could imagine. There’s no point in panic. The best hope lies in the strength and quality of public debate and democratic institutions to regulate and direct the use of these powerful technologies. — Â