http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...ed-humans.html
The new incredibles: Enhanced humans
13 May 2006
NewScientist.com
Graham Lawton
They're here and walking among us: people with technologically
enhanced senses, superhuman bodies and artificially sharpened minds.
The first humans to reach a happy, healthy 150th birthday may
already have been born. And that's just the start of it. Are you
ready for your upgrade, asks Graham Lawton
(Technologically, or by using the MDM exercises? Grin!)
IT IS 2050, and Peter Schwartz is deciding what to do with the rest
of his life. He has already had two successful careers and he wants
another one before he dies, which he expects to happen in around 50
years. By then he'll be about 150, which isn't bad for a baby
boomer, but he expects his son, now 60, to live a lot longer than
that.
The world that Schwartz lives in is radically different from the one
he grew up in. The industrial and information age has passed into
history, overtaken by a revolution in bioscience that began around
the turn of the century. Schwartz is surrounded by astonishingly
healthy, happy, rich and long-lived people. Many possess biological
enhancements that exceed the abilities they were born with: sharper
senses, for example, or better memories and greater intelligence.
Meanwhile the ageing process has been radically slowed down; there
are centenarians who pass for 50, and 60-year-olds who look 30. Some
people are already living beyond 120, and longevity records keep
being broken. Disease is largely a thing of the past. Designer
babies are commonplace, and some babies are even being born with
engineered genetic traits that they will pass onto their own
children.
Schwartz isn't in the business of making idle predictions. In the
real world of 2006 he is a business strategist and "scenario
planner" who advises companies how to prepare for the future. While
his vision sounds like a techno-utopian fantasy, as far-fetched as
1950s predictions that by now we would live in cities on the moon or
swallow pills instead of food, the prospect of human enhancement is
being taken increasingly seriously. The World Economic Forum
discussed it at its most recent meeting in January. The US National
Science Foundation and the UK's Office of Science and Technology are
investigating the issues it raises. Even President Bush has been
briefed about it in exhaustive detail.
Humans, of course, have always strived to tame or even transcend
nature through technology, but our efforts up to now look puny and
ineffectual compared with what is about to happen. "We're at an
inflection point in history," says Joel Garreau, a writer with The
Washington Post whose recent book, Radical Evolution, has made him
something of a guru in human enhancement circles. "For hundreds of
thousands of years our technologies have been aimed outward, at
modifying our environment. Now we've got a suite of technologies
that are aimed inward, at modifying our minds, metabolisms,
personalities and children."
The coming revolution
Garreau is not the first to point this out. Back in 2002, a working
group set up by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) predicted
an imminent scientific and technological revolution that would
enable "tremendous improvements" in human abilities. A year later
the President's Council on Bioethics, set up by George W. Bush to
advise him on issues such as stem cells and cloning, compiled a list
of real-world technologies that could, now or in the very near
future, be used to enhance normal human functioning. It identified
five broad areas, ranging from genetic engineering to replacement
body parts (see "We have the technology").
None of these technologies were explicitly designed to allow healthy
people to transcend their limits. They were created to cure disease
and disability, but what the council recognised was that all of them
have potential to be used "beyond therapy" - "to alter the normal
workings of the human body and psyche, to augment or improve their
native capacities and performances". The council was also among the
first to recognise a significant fact about such technologies: if it
has enhancement potential, healthy people will start using it to
give them an edge.
According to some reports, around 10 per cent of US university
students regularly take Ritalin or other prescription stimulants
as "smart drugs" to boost their attention and concentration. The
wakefulness promoter modafinil (Provigil) is increasingly being used
in a similar way (New Scientist, 18 February, p 34). "The drugs are
quite primitive but people are paying $80 a pop because they're
convinced that they will make all the difference," says Garreau.
Viagra, meanwhile, has become a recreational drug; cosmetic surgery,
which is based on techniques originally developed to treat injuries
or disfigurements, has never been more popular or socially
acceptable; and performance-enhancing substances are rife in
professional sport. Even reproductive technologies are being co-
opted in ways that blur the boundary between therapy and
enhancement: IVF parents requesting sex selection of embryos, for
example, to engineer the ideal family.
"All these advances follow the same pattern," says Garreau. "They're
initially aimed at people who are sick. Then they move out to the
needy well. Then they move out to anyone who's looking for an
advantage."
For those seeking that advantage, more opportunities are just around
the corner - a lot more. Around 40 cognition-enhancing drugs are in
development right now, designed to improve wakefulness, attention,
memory, decision making and planning (see "Smarter minds").
Gerontologists are starting to believe we could directly intervene
in the process of senescence to significantly increase the average
human lifespan.
There have also been rapid advances in brain-machine interfaces,
such as retinal implants, communication devices for paralysed and
locked-in patients, and even memory prostheses, hinting at the
possibility of neural implants that enhance normal functioning.
Progress in genetic engineering and gene therapy suggests that we
will soon be able to rewrite our own genetic code, and that of
future generations, removing broken genes, correcting errors and
even inserting new ones (See "Designer children"). To Garreau the
conclusion is inescapable. "We're not talking about changing humans
in some distant science-fiction future. This is happening on our
watch."
According to the NSF, the technologies that make human enhancement
possible are collectively known as nano-bio-info-cogno -
nanoscience, biotech, IT and cognitive science. And if what they are
already capable of is hard to believe, what is predicted for the
next 20 or 30 years is positively mind-blowing.
When futurologists start gazing into their crystal balls the results
are notoriously unreliable, but there are some things we can say
with reasonable certainty. One is that if you want to predict where
technology will be 20 years from now, you can't use the progress of
the previous 20 as your guide. That's because most technologies are
advancing not linearly, but exponentially. In other words, what they
are capable of keeps on doubling every few months or years.
Exponential growth initially looks like linear growth, but soon
enough it starts producing spectacular gains in ever shorter periods
of time. Once you factor exponential growth into the equation, the
progress of the previous 20 years are, at best, a guide to the next
eight.
Unprecedented growth
The most celebrated example of exponential growth in technology is
Moore's law, which states that by almost any measure you choose -
the number of transistors on a silicon chip, say, or the amount of
memory you can buy for a dollar - the performance of computing
doubles approximately every 18 months (see Graph). The computer
industry has obeyed Moore's law for the past 40 years and shows no
signs of losing its way. That means within living memory, computing
power has increased more than 100 million-fold. You probably have
more processing power in your microwave oven than was available to
the entire world in 1950. That's a rate of technological growth
unprecedented in human history.
Exponential growth in computing power drives similar growth in other
technologies. For example, the cost of sequencing a single letter of
DNA, a task requiring immense amounts of processing power, has
halved every 23 months since 1990. It took 15 years to sequence the
genome of HIV; SARS was done in 31 days. The resolution of brain
scanners is doubling every 18 months. The number of nanotechnology
patents filed in the US has doubled every two years or so since
1990. And so on. According to the NSF, nano-bio-info-cogno all have
the capacity to grow exponentially for decades to come.
Mutually reinforcing growth is only half the story. The NSF says
there is another important trend to take into account. This
is "convergence" - the idea that as these separate technological
strands develop, the boundaries between them will blur and they will
eventually merge into a single, unified science "based on the unity
of nature", as the NSF put it.