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Confirmed User
Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 1,500
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Life transformed
Some futurologists, notably Ray Kurzweil of Kurzweil Technologies in
Wellesley, Massachusetts, argue that exponential growth and
technological convergence will lead to a "singularity", a time when
change becomes so rapid and pervasive that human life is
irreversibly transformed (New Scientist, 24 September 2005, p 32).
Even if that doesn't happen - and in Schwarz's 2050 scenario it
hasn't - exponential growth still holds out the prospect of
extraordinary technological progress in as little as 20 or 30 years:
brain implants that allow direct mind-to-mind communication; memory
chips that let you upload new knowledge directly into your brain;
genetic upgrades that can be reversibly slotted into all the cells
in your body; custom-made replacement body parts; and so on.
From a human perspective, that means having almost limitless power
over our own biology - the power to end disease, abolish pain and
suffering, endow ourselves with superhuman levels of beauty,
athleticism and brains, and radically slow down or maybe even halt
ageing (see "Towards immortality"). "I believe our descendants will
look on our lives with pity, in the same way we look on the lives of
our Pleistocene ancestors," says bioethicist James Hughes of Trinity
College in Hartford, Connecticut.
For many people that future cannot come soon enough, and no wonder:
human enhancement promises to fulfil some of our deepest-held
desires. Suppose you were offered an extra 50 years of life, endowed
with what Schwartz calls "superhealth", physical and mental
capabilities that exceed the ones you were born with, not to mention
the prospect of an even better life for your children. Would you
turn it down?
Liberation or slavery?
Of course, "better" is always subjective. If the prospect of a world
full of youthful centenarians, drugged up to the eyeballs, bristling
with brain implants and possessed of the power to engineer the
genetic future of our species makes you feel vaguely uneasy, you're
not alone. Human enhancement might promise liberation, but it will
bring its own peculiar difficulties, which is why we need to start
thinking about it now.
Imagine it's 2026 and your 17-year-old daughter or granddaughter has
decided she wants to go to Harvard. She works hard at school but her
grades are not quite good enough. Then a technology comes along - a
memory-boosting drug, say - that would significantly increase her
chances of getting in. She begs you for it. She tells you all her
classmates are taking it and if you say no you will be jeopardising
her chances not only of getting into Harvard but of getting into
higher education at all. What do you do?
Perhaps you decide that if she's going to get into Harvard, she has
to do it using the brainpower she was born with. On the other hand,
what's the difference between buying the drugs and paying for extra
tuition? Maybe you can't afford it anyway, which is a relief as
you're not convinced it's safe. If you can afford it, perhaps you
worry that if she gets in off the back of a performance-enhancing
drug, she won't feel an appropriate sense of achievement. And what
happens when the next enhancement technology comes along? Will you
have to buy that one too, just so she can keep up? Perhaps the
easiest thing to do would be to start a campaign to get cognitive-
enhancing drugs banned in schools...
As more and more enhancement technologies become available, these
dilemmas will grow increasingly familiar. Is it safe? Should it be
regulated? Will it lead to an "enhancement divide" between the haves
and have-nots, or even conflict between the "enhanced" and
the "naturals"? Would people feel pressured or even coerced into
using them simply to keep up?
"They're legitimate concerns," says Hughes, who has argued that the
enhancement divide is a real enough worry that some such
technologies ought to be made available through the public health
system. Then again, says Hughes, they're arguably nothing new.
Society already faces such problems in spades. According to
bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia, none of these issues are showstoppers for human
enhancement. "They're not good arguments about why we shouldn't try
to improve ourselves," he says.
Enhancement does, however, bring one new and potentially explosive
question: what will it do to our sense of being human? If your
daughter takes the drug and gets in to Harvard, she has arguably
missed out on an essential human experience - striving for success
and learning to deal with failure. Similarly, if you knew you could
live to be 150, would you bother working hard on your career right
now? How would you decide when it was time to settle down and have
kids? If you could download knowledge onto a memory chip, why bother
to learn anything, or value knowledge and experience? If life was
free of pain and disease, would you have any idea what happiness is?
If everyone was enhanced, would the world be a dull and homogeneous
place?
These are tough questions, but they all boil down to the same thing:
by enhancing ourselves would we somehow throw away our humanity? For
many opponents of these technologies, the answer is an emphatic yes.
To them, a world of enhanced humans would be a world that has lost
all meaning. The President's Council on Bioethics likened it to
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: its technologically enhanced
inhabitants live cheerfully, without disappointment or regret, the
council's report points out, but lead "flat, empty lives devoid of
love and longing, filled with only trivial pursuits and shallow
attachments". Some opponents of enhancement argue that these dangers
are so great that the only safe course of action is to put a stop to
the whole enterprise. Bioethicist George Annas of Boston University,
for example, has proposed a global treaty making human genetic
modification a crime against humanity.
Others turn the human nature question on its head. "To the extent
that we are born with impulses for aggression, racism and
selfishness or limits on our capacity for wisdom and compassion, we
may be morally obliged to modify human nature," says Hughes. Caplan
argues that all technologies are attempts to transcend human
nature. "That's what agriculture is. That's what plumbing is. That's
what clothes are. That's what transportation systems are. Do they
make us less human? Or are they one possible contender for what it
means to be human?"
Not everyone believes we will have to face these questions
imminently. Alfred Nordman, a historian of science at Darmstadt
Technical University in Germany, doesn't buy into the inevitability
of explosive technological progress leading to a post-human
future. "I don't have a sense that I'm living in an era of
accelerating technological change," he says. "I think my
grandparents saw more technological changes that I will." And even
if technology does make radical enhancement technology such as brain
implants possible, Nordman doesn't see much demand for it. "We need
a reality check," he says.
Nordman, however, is in a minority. According to Schwarz, it is
almost inevitable - "overdetermined", in the jargon of his
profession - that the next 20 to 30 years will see the rapid
progress that makes his 2050 scenario possible. "The problems are
really difficult," he says. "Really controlling genetic systems,
really understanding the brain. They won't be solved by 2010 or
2015. I think it will be slower than some people hope, but it's
inevitable that we will make great scientific progress."
If you accept that, the big question facing us now is whether we
want to go down the road towards an enhanced future. The President's
Council on Bioethics is clear that this is not a debate that can be
delayed. "Decisions we are making today - for instance, what to do
about sex selection or genetic selection of embryos, or whether to
prescribe behaviour-modifying drugs to preschoolers, or how
vigorously to try to reverse the processes of senescence - will set
the path 'beyond therapy' for coming generations," its report says.
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