Make Way for the Superhumans E-Book

Michael Bess

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 600

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Biomedical research is changing the both the format and the functions of human beings. Very soon the human race will be faced with a choice: do we join in with the enhancement or not?  Make Way for the Superhumans looks at how far this technology has come and what aims and ambitions it has. From robotic implants that restore sight to the blind, to performance enhancing drugs that build muscles, improve concentration, and maintain erections, bio-enhancement has already made massive advances.  Humans have already developed the technology to transmit thoughts and actions brain-to-brain using only a computer interface. By the time our grandchildren are born, they will be presented with the option to significantly alter and redesign their bodies.   Make Way for the Superhumans is the only book that poses the questions that need answering now: suggesting real, practical ways of dealing with this technology before it reaches a point where it can no longer be controlled.

Leseprobe

Make Way for the Superhumans

‘One of the most thoughtful meditations on the future that I have read. … the book is carefully and conscientiously crafted, and meticulously argued. Bess is also impartial, giving a fair hearing to contradictory arguments, and wrestling fairly with the ideas as he encounters them.’

Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

‘Rejuvenation therapies that could potentially extend human lifespans to 160 years or more, chemical or bioelectronic cognitive enhancement that could double or triple IQ scores, bioelectronic devices for modulating brain processes including “pleasure centres”, so-called “designer babies”, and much more are poised to cross the threshhold from science fiction to reality in the near future. Michael Bess offers a sober prediction of how such advances will directly affect human society, and the ethical dilemmas that could result. … fascinating from cover to cover and near-impossible to put down. Highly recommended!’

Midwest Book Review

MAKE WAY FOR THE

SUPERHUMANS

ALSO BY MICHAEL BESS

Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II

The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000

Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945–1989

MAKE WAY FOR THE

SUPERHUMANS

How the science of bio-enhancement is transforming our world, and how we need to deal with it

MICHAEL BESS

This edition published in the UK in 2016

by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

First published in the USA in 2015

under the title Our Grandchildren Redesigned

by Beacon Press Books, under the auspices of

the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street,

London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia

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Grantham NG31 7XQ

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

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Distributed in India by Penguin Books India, 7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

ISBN: 978-178578-101-8

Text copyright © 2015 Michael Bess

The author has asserted his moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Text design and composition by Kim Arney

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

FOR

Wendell Berry and his sycamore, Marty Griffin and the Marin-Sonoma coastline,

AND

my 1963 Volvo, Baby Stokanza-Minza, who taught me that a machine is not just a machine

…

In the place that is my own place, whose earth

I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,

a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,

hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in

that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it

that is its death, though its living brims whitely

at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.

Over all its scars has come the seamless white

of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history

healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection

in the warp and bending of its long growth.

It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.

It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.

It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.

In all the country there is no other like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling

the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.

I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it,

and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.

—WENDELL BERRY,

“The Sycamore” (1998)1

CONTENTS

Welcome to the Future

PART I: HUMANS REDESIGNED

ONEEnvisioning the Future: Between the Jetsons and the Singularity

TWOPharmaceuticals

THREEBioelectronics

FOURGenetics and Epigenetics

FIVEWild Cards: Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Synthetic Biology

PART II: JUSTICE

SIXShould We Reengineer the Human Condition?

SEVENWho Gets Enhanced?

EIGHTA Fragmenting Species? Cultural Preferences Inscribed into Biology

NINEIf I Ran the Zoo: Adventures along the Plant-Animal-Human-Machine Borderlands

PART III: IDENTITY

TENMechanization of the Self

ELEVENTurbocharging Moral Character

TWELVEShared Intimacies: Monitoring and Transmitting Mental Information

THIRTEENVirtual Reality and (Yawn) This Other Reality

FOURTEENTill Death Do Us No Longer Part: Implications of Extremely Long Health Spans

FIFTEENNew Sounds for the Old Guitar: Sex, Food, Privacy, the Arts, Warfare

PART IV: CHOICES

SIXTEENWhy Extreme Modifications Should Be Postponed: Or, the Singularity Can Wait

SEVENTEENHumane Values in a World of Moderate Enhancements

EIGHTEENWhat You and I Can Do Today

NINETEENEnhancing Humility: Some Concluding Thoughts

Selected Filmography

Selected Bibliography / Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

ONLINE COMPANION WEBSITE TO THIS BOOK:

www.ourgrandchildrenredesigned.org

Updates on Science and Technology

Updates on Social and Cultural Implications

Appendices

Dialogue Page

Full Bibliography

Welcome to the Future

Reflections from an autumn afternoon in 2049

They’ve nicknamed me Mr. Amish. That’s what they’re calling people like me these days. I smile, I shrug. My son, my grandkids—they’re not being mean. They put their arm around my shoulders, squeezing gently, I can feel the affection. Amish grandpa. It’s kind of like I’m a living window into the past.

Ever since Martha died, nineteen years ago, I stopped doing all the fancy pills and implants and epigenetic boosts. I kept the bioenhancements I had, and left it at that. No more upgrades, no more tweaks. I’d had enough.

It’s hard for them to understand. They argue with me, my son Pete pleads with me. “You’ll feel so much better, Dad. You know you will.”

But what if I don’t want to feel better?

I glance across the living room at my grandson Kenny, playing 3-D chess with his younger sister Gwendolyn. He’s ten, she’s eight. They’re sitting across from each other on the floor near the window, eyes closed, wearing their headsets. The old maple stands just outside, its foliage of orange and yellow raining down color with the afternoon sunlight.

I used to be really good at chess—the old-fashioned 2-D kind. Kenny started beating me at that when he was six. Now it’s 3-D chess they all play, the moves and threats and gambits simultaneously above and below, exponentially more complicated. Gwen’s giving him a run for his money. She’s even better at it than he is.

Makes you wonder, though. We give them neuroceuticals with their vitamins in the morning, we make them wear cortical stimulation headsets while they do their homework, we epigenetically tweak their memory and acuity. Then my son acts surprised when he finds his daughter crying in her bedroom, reading the New York Times. How do you explain genocide to an eight-year-old kid? Problem is, she understands the article all too well. It’s human nature that has her baffled.

When I bring this up with Pete, he just looks at me like I’m clueless. “What do you want me to do, Dad? Bring everything to a halt? Have everyone else in their grade running circles around ’em?”

I’m not the only one who feels this way, of course. All of us who were born before the onset of it all, we sometimes have a hard time adapting.

I just never thought it would happen so fast, so soon. I was born in 1979. I witnessed the birth of the Web, watched it spread through our culture. I understood the acceleration of technology. At least I thought I did. Hell, I even invested in it, made a pile of money in epigenetics stock.

So many aspects of it are amazing—the inventions unfolding all around us like one of those fast-forward movies of a garden in bloom. They’ve improved our lives in so many ways. I’m turning seventy this December, and I feel like I did when I was forty-five. Better, actually.

But other aspects of it—if I’m really honest …

…

Over the coming decades—probably a lot sooner than most people realize—the next great wave of technological change will wash over our lives. Its impact will be similar in sweep and rapidity to the advent of computers, cell phones, and the Web; but this time around, it is not our gadgets that will be transformed—it is we ourselves, our bodies, our minds. This will be a shift that cuts even more deeply than the great industrial revolutions of the past. It will not only alter how we make a living, communicate, and interact with each other, but will offer direct and precise control over our own physical and mental states. People will be able to sculpt their own selfhood over time, reshaping their bodies, augmenting their cognition, reconfiguring their character and personality. We will live through this process, year by year, marveling all the while at how malleable our species turned out to be.

If you talk to the authors of this revolution—the scientists, doctors, and engineers who labor tirelessly at the vanguard of biotechnology—most of them will deny that this is what they have in mind. They are not seeking to bring about the transmogrification of the human species, they insist: they are simply doing their best to heal the sick, to repair the injured. But once you stand back and look at the big picture, sizing up the cumulative impact of all their brilliant efforts, a different conclusion emerges. Whether they intend it or not, they are giving our species the instruments with which to radically redesign itself. Those instruments are already becoming available in crude form today, and they will fully come into their own over the next few decades. By the time our grandchildren have grown to adulthood, this wave of change will have passed through our civilization.

The results will be mixed. Some of the new bioenhanced capabilities will be splendid to behold (and to experience). People will live longer, healthier, more productive lives; they will connect with each other in seamless webs of direct interactivity; they will be able to fine-tune their own moods and thought processes; they will interact with machines in entirely new ways; their augmented minds will generate staggeringly complex and subtle forms of knowledge and insight.

At the same time, these technologies will also create formidable challenges. If only the rich have access to the most potent bioenhancements, this will exacerbate the already grievous rift between haves and have-nots. Competition will be keen for the most sophisticated enhancement products—because an individual’s professional and social success will be at stake. As these technologies advance, they will continuously raise the bar of “normal” performance, forcing people to engage in constant cycles of upgrades and boosts merely to keep up. People will tend to identify strongly with their particular “enhancement profiles,” clustering together in novel social and cultural groupings that could lead to new forms of prejudice, rivalry, and outright conflict. Some bioenhancements will offer such fine-grained control over feelings and moods that they risk turning people into emotional puppets. Individuals who boost their traits beyond a certain threshold may acquire such extreme capabilities that they will no longer be recognized as unambiguously human.

Until recently in human history, the major technological watersheds all came about incrementally, spread out over centuries or longer. Think, for example, of the shift from stone to metal tools, the transition from nomadic hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, or the substitution of mechanical power for human and animal sources of energy. In all these cases, people and social systems had time to adapt: they gradually developed new values and habits to accommodate the transformed material conditions. But this is not the case with the current epochal shift. This time around, the radical innovations are coming upon us with relative suddenness—in a time frame that encompasses four or five decades, a century at most. A central argument of this book is that contemporary society is dangerously unprepared for the dramatic changes it is about to experience, down this road on which it is already advancing at an accelerating pace.

More specifically, my thesis is threefold.

It’s almost certainly going to happen. Advanced enhancement technologies will become a reality, even if they are initially opposed by significant minorities of the population. They will come into being, not because of some impersonal, deterministic process outside of human control, but rather because people will actively choose them. Many of these inventions will prove irresistibly desirable for a sufficiently large number of citizens, who will eagerly purchase them once they are declared safe and made available on the market.It will bring both opportunity and peril. Most bioenhancements will have significant benefits and equally significant dangers. Some of the benefits will be spectacular in nature, offering wonderful new capabilities and powers. Some of the dangers will be so profound that they will outweigh any benefits, and will therefore justify the banning or postponement of particular categories of modifications.Its impact will be radical. Enhancement technologies—even the most apparently sensible and benign ones—will destabilize key aspects of our social order, as well as our understanding of what it means to be human. Many of the values and assumptions that lend structure and meaning to our lives—family bonds, stages of life, our sense of ourselves as mortal and limited creatures, the boundaries between one person and another—will have to be reexamined and perhaps even reconfigured as a result.

WHAT COLOR IS THE TINT OF YOUR GLASSES?

One of the tricky things about looking at the future is that you have to tread a fine line between pessimism and optimism. If you place your accent on the nastier sides of the long human track record—wars, oppression, betrayal, greed, hate—this will inevitably color your image of the future as well. If, instead, you base your vision on the more encouraging aspects of society’s past—cooperation, invention, emancipation, mutual understanding—this yields a quite different picture of tomorrow.

In this book I take a middle road, because I believe that the human story is itself—like the enhancement technologies—a mixed bag. History is too complicated (and interesting) to be straightforwardly summed up in a visceral judgment along the lines of “60 percent nasty, 40 percent good,” or “70 percent angels, 30 percent devils.” Our angels and our devils walk arm in arm all the time, moment by moment.

I have approached this topic not as a historian of science and technology (which is my day job) but more as a middle-aged man who has a daughter and a son, and who found himself fretting about what kind of world they would end up living in. There is plenty for a parent to cringe about in the unknown future, to be sure, but what really bothered me was a nagging thought: what if things actually go pretty well, overall, and our society somehow manages to avoid all the more obvious threats that loom over human-kind, such as pandemics, economic meltdown, climate upheaval, large-scale terrorist attacks, or war? What then?

It struck me that, even under this optimistic scenario, we still have some tough challenges coming our way from a rather surprising quarter, namely, medicine and engineering—the arts of healing, building, and inventing. These fields are generally considered among the more benign areas of human endeavor, but they have become so powerful and sophisticated in recent years as to confront us with godlike choices and dilemmas. When do we pull the plug on a stricken relative whose selfhood is no longer intact? What are we to make of a sixty-six-year-old woman who gives birth to triplets? Is it wrong to insert genes from animals and plants into human embryos?

If decisions like these are already baffling and dividing us today, imagine how much more fraught they will be four or five decades hence, when the human applications of biotechnology have come into full deployment. Major augmentations of our traits and capabilities will spread across the whole panoply of human experience, but will they truly improve our quality of life? When lots of people undertake them—not just hundreds or thousands, but millions—what kind of global social order will result? Might these technologies undermine or disrupt some of the things we hold dearest? Or will they, on the whole, make a positive impact, opening up widespread possibilities for greater human flourishing?

The book has four parts. In the first, “Humans Redesigned,” I describe the strategy I have adopted for thinking about the near- and middle-term future. Although none of us has a crystal ball, I argue that not all aspects of the mid-twenty-first century are equally uncertain or unpredictable—and that some forms of disciplined speculation about the shape of tomorrow’s society can therefore prove useful. I then survey the state of the art in the science and technology of human bioenhancement, concentrating on three main areas—pharmaceuticals, bioelectronics, and genetics—through which the most far-reaching modifications of humans are likely to occur over the coming decades. My emphasis here is on what the experts themselves are saying about the likely future trajectory of innovation in their fields.

In the second part, “Justice,” I explore the collective, societal implications of enhancement technologies, while part three, “Identity,” focuses on their more ethereal effects on us as individual persons. I avoid sweeping generalizations about the morality of the “enhancement enterprise”—a Manichean thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Instead, I examine each type of enhancement technology on a case-by-case basis. Taken together, these chapters are designed to complement each other like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, leaving the reader with a vivid sense of what the middle years of the twenty-first century might plausibly look like, and what it would feel like to live in such a world.

Finally in the last part, “Choices,” I present an overview of the ethical questions raised by the enterprise of human enhancement. Here I compare the relative merits of radical enhancements as opposed to more modest and limited interventions, posing a set of basic, “civilization-shaping” questions: How far do we want to go in using biotechnology to alter the human constitution? What kinds of modifications should we embrace, and which should we reject? And how much of a say do we really have in determining the manner in which these devices and practices will enter our lives?

In order to lend greater concreteness to the discussion, I open some chapters with brief fictional vignettes in which I describe what the future world of enhanced humans might actually look and feel like, as I did in the opening of this introduction. To be sure, we have no way of knowing which aspects, if any, of these imagined scenarios will actually come to pass. However, as long as we bear in mind that these vignettes are speculative exercises—educated guesses—they can vividly illustrate the kinds of challenges that our grandchildren may find themselves encountering.

COMPANION WEBSITE: WWW.OURGRANDCHILDRENREDESIGNED.ORG

Since this book explores many domains of cutting-edge science and technology, I have created a companion website where I will post regular updates on the rapidly evolving developments at the forefront of these fields—as well as their social and moral implications. On this site I also present two complete versions of the book’s bibliography, the first organized thematically and the second alphabetically, as well as a number of appendices in which I explore in greater depth certain arguments or issues that I excluded from the main body of text for reasons of space. I also include a “dialogue page” where I will respond on an ongoing basis to criticisms, observations, and new ideas provided by readers of the book. You can access the website at www.ourgrandchildrenredesigned.org.

Part I

HUMANS REDESIGNED

…..

ONE

Envisioning the Future

Between the Jetsons and the Singularity

The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet1

WHY SOME FORECASTS SUCCEED (WHILE OTHERS FAIL MISERABLY)

Any book about the near- and middle-term future—extending from the present day to several decades over the horizon—justifiably elicits skepticism, because we humans have a very mixed record in the art of prognostication.2 Some thinkers seem to have foreseen the shape of things to come with uncanny accuracy: one thinks of Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous prediction in the 1830s that the rivalry between Russia and America would one day come to dominate world affairs. Tocqueville’s prediction took 130 years to come true, but when one pondered his words from the perspective of the 1960s, they seemed downright oracular. Most others, however, have not proved nearly as successful in their forecasts. Amid the myriad examples, you might know of Lord Ernest Rutherford, the leading figure in British physics during the 1930s, who categorically dismissed the possibility of harnessing the forces of the atom as “the merest moonshine.”3 Just twelve years later, this moonshine had obliterated two Japanese cities.

So we face an important question, right at the outset: Is this whole exercise a waste of time? Precisely because our knowledge of the future cannot help but be speculative and imperfect, should we abandon the effort to make out what lies in store for us in the middle years of the coming century? Does that future simply lie too far away for any assessments of it to be of much use at all?

The key to answering this question lies in the fact that not all aspects of the future are equally uncertain. Will gravitation still play a role in our lives two hundred years from now? Of course it will. Will someone named Marcia be president of the United States two hundred years from now? No one can know. The reason for the difference is that, in the case of gravitation, we are talking about a structural factor: one of those causal processes that only changes very gradually, if at all. In the case of who will occupy the Oval Office, we are talking about a conjunctural factor: a causal process that will be determined more locally, by events unfolding in a much shorter span of time.

History, in other words, is usefully thought of as a layered phenomenon, governed by distinct time frames of change: some causal sequences play themselves out over much longer spans of time than others.4 Therefore, in making statements about the future, it is important to keep the time frame of your prediction commensurate with the causal processes you’re describing. If you want to predict whether Marcia will be president, you cannot do so beyond a time frame of one to five years at most. If you want to predict the impact of gravitation, you can safely extend your forecast out for centuries (indeed, millennia) into the future, with confidence that the underlying causal processes will not have had enough time to change in any fundamental way.

Therefore, as we try to envision what the world will look like in the middle years of the twentieth century, we can be reasonably confident in projecting certain structural features rooted in time frames of change of fifty years or more, and proportionately less confident in predicting other structural elements whose qualities are determined in relatively shorter time frames (say, twenty to fifty years). We should avoid altogether the attempt to forecast those conjunctural elements that will be shaped in a causal frame of one to twenty years.

If we divide the events and causal processes of the coming century into these rough categories, what sorts of examples do we get?

LONG STRUCTURAL PROCESSES (FIFTY YEARS OR MORE)

Physical and material constraints, such as the relation between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.Sociological patterns, such as the division of society into economic classes.Deep cultural patterns, such as the division of society into identity groups (for example, religion, race, ethnicity, and so on).Gradual economic processes such as globalization.Psychological constants in human behavior, such as the tendency to put family first.Geopolitical patterns pertaining to the relative weight of particular nations in world affairs.

SHORT STRUCTURAL PROCESSES (TWENTY TO FIFTY YEARS)

Life span of particular governmental and economic institutions, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), NASA, the Transportation Security Administration, Pan American World Airways, Starbucks, Microsoft.Economic patterns, such as the ascendancy of particular industries or sectors of production (the decline of labor-intensive agriculture, the service economy, the information economy, for example).Social and cultural shifts, such as the impact of the sixties counterculture or the changes wrought by the civil rights movement in the lives of African Americans.Political patterns, such as the ascendancy of liberal versus conservative ideology in public affairs (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legacy, the Ronald Reagan era, and so on).

CONJUNCTURAL PROCESSES (ONE TO TWENTY YEARS)

The influence (for good or ill) of gifted individuals, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, or Mikhail Gorbachev.Short-term economic and political patterns, such as economic recessions and recoveries, or the policies of particular presidential administrations.Rare but significant events in the material world (earthquakes or disease pandemics, for example).Relatively sudden scientific or technological breakthroughs, such as the creation of the atomic bomb, the development of antibiotics, the discovery of DNA, or the emergence of the Internet. We know such short-term breakthroughs will almost certainly happen, but we cannot have a clear idea in advance of what they will be, and how they will affect the future.Major political events such as wars, which can change the course of history in unforeseeable but profound ways.

The first feature worth noting about this three-tiered list is that the conjunctural processes are not necessarily superficial in their impacts. While it is true that the vast majority of conjunctural events only exert a relatively local effect on the surrounding world, some of them end up producing major inflections in the course of history. “Conjunctural” does not necessarily mean “ephemeral” or “weak.”

This is, of course, bad news for us prognosticators. If the conjunctural processes are the hardest to predict beyond a time horizon of twenty years, and yet some of them prove to be extremely potent determinants of historical change, this introduces a major wild card into all our middle-term predictions. I don’t see any way around this basic fact, and it should induce us to be proportionately humble in our efforts of forecasting beyond the twenty-year horizon.

But, here, another aspect of our three-tiered list comes into play. Novel technologies tend to change more quickly, radically, and unpredictably than human social, economic, and cultural institutions.5 The rise of the Internet, for example, became a major historical phenomenon in less than twenty years, but phenomena like racial prejudice, class conflict, gender bias, and similar social and cultural factors tend to evolve much more slowly. The implication is clear: we are likely to do better at predicting general patterns of human social behavior than detailed technological outcomes. In envisioning the coming century, we should not try to foresee too precisely which technologies will exist in different decades. If we insist on doing so, we are likely to end up pulling a Rutherford.

Instead, we should focus on the impacts that broad categories of technology are likely to have on our society, economy, and culture. We can have no clear knowledge about what the machines of 2040 or 2050 will be like, but we do have a much better sense of how the people of that era would likely respond to specific sets of machine capabilities. We should therefore lay out a deliberately wide range of plausible scenarios for the technologies that might exist in the coming century, so that the very breadth of our range compensates for our inherent weakness in forecasting the fine-grained details of technological change. Then, for each plausible type of technology, we should assess what the social impacts are likely to be. This is the procedure I adopt in the chapters that follow.

THE JETSONS FALLACY

In 1962 a new TV show entered American living rooms. Modeled on the immensely popular The Flintstones, it depicted the daily life and middle-class misadventures of a family of the year 2062, the Jetsons. The show’s creators, Hanna-Barbera Productions, clearly bent over backward to offer the most spectacularly bland image they could of the world that awaits us. A full century will go by, they seemed to be telling us, and absolutely nothing of any importance will change in the slightest. Benignly patriarchal fathers will still bumble their way through the challenges of parenting and office work; wives will be well coiffed; children will cultivate an endearing rebelliousness (within carefully observed limits). What marks the future as different, according to Hanna-Barbera Productions, is the advent of new gadgets. Houses, stores, and office buildings rise up on pillars in the sky; cars fly; children are whisked off to school in pneumatic-tube bubbles. Robots are everywhere, of course. They perform all manner of menial tasks, offering abundant opportunities for hilarity when they malfunction.

This popular TV show perfectly captures a recurring misconception in contemporary visions of the future: the tendency to imagine that our technologies will evolve dramatically and even radically, while we humans will stay fundamentally the same. I refer to this as the Jetsons fallacy. If one surveys the most influential science-fiction visions of the future—those movies and books that have broken out of the niche of sci-fi buffs and shaped the imagination of the broader society—one encounters this phenomenon again and again.6

In the Star Wars films and Star Trek TV series, for example, we certainly do encounter many alien biological species and intelligent robots.7 But all these strange beings coexist alongside a population of unmodified humans who are no different from the humans of today. Some popular science-fiction movies, such as Blade Runner, AI, and Bicentennial Man, explore the rise of robots or artificial intelligence to a human level of conscious awareness. But here, once again, these advanced machine beings coexist with a population of humans who remain rigorously unmodified, undefiled.

In many cases, as in The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Hulk, Inspector Gadget, Alien: Resurrection, Spider-Man, Iron Man, or Limitless, we do encounter humans who undergo profound biological redesign, but always under the same conditions: whether accidental or deliberate, the modification is uniquely confined to a single individual, and never applies to the surrounding population. Viewers are emphatically not invited to contemplate a world in which large numbers of humans have gone down this path.

Aldous Huxley’s 1932 masterpiece, Brave New World, stands out as the most important exception to this trend. Huxley’s imagery of bioengineered castes and drug-induced manipulation of the masses has penetrated very deeply into contemporary culture. What is striking, however, is precisely how unique Brave New World remains within the subset of science-fiction works that have become cultural landmarks. Eight decades have passed since its publication, and it still occupies a place of solitary prominence as the only systematic effort to imagine a world populated by engineered humans.8

One might object that the 1997 film Gattaca fills such a role. But this film, too, falls into its own version of the Jetsons fallacy. In the world it depicts, genetically enhanced humans and unmodified humans are impossible to tell apart (except through DNA tests). The movie tells the story of an unmodified human who, through sheer force of will, overcomes his genetic “destiny” and outperforms those engineered humans whom society labels as superior. This is certainly a dystopia, but it is a dystopia that refuses to confront the consequences of its own underlying premise: the possibility that genetic science, systematically applied, might actually result in a population of individuals whose mental and physical performance vastly exceeds that of the unmodified. In this sense, the film’s message seems to be that, even if genetic engineering does become widespread, this won’t be such a big deal. Ordinary old-fashioned humans will still be able to prevail.

What are we to make of this phenomenon? The answer lies in the economics of mass-appeal films and books, which are supposed to beguile us, not freak us out. The technological modification of entire populations of humans is not a fit subject for mass entertainment because it is simply too disturbing to contemplate. If it must be confronted at all, it must always be coupled with the ironclad assurance that, even in the most extreme future, ordinary humans will still exist, and will still continue to be what they are today.

The only problem with this comforting picture of the future is that it is probably not true! We are headed into a social order whose most salient new feature may well be the systematic modification of human bodies and minds through increasingly powerful means. This process is already underway today and seems unlikely to slow down in the decades to come. The prevalence of the Jetsons fallacy suggests that many people in contemporary society are living in a state of denial, psychologically unprepared for what is actually far more likely to be coming their way.

THE SINGULARITY

One writer who has definitely not succumbed to the Jetsons fallacy is the inventor and businessman Ray Kurzweil. In a series of books written over the past twenty-five years, he has laid out a vision of the future that not only prophesies radical change, but enthusiastically embraces it.9 Kurzweil conceives of this coming transformation as a relatively sudden event, like the crossing of a threshold: he calls it the Singularity.10

The image of the Singularity is drawn from the physics of black holes, which astronomers sometimes describe as “singular” objects in space-time because they are locations in the universe at which the fundamental laws of physics break down. The metaphor is apt, because if people like Kurzweil prove right in their predictions, then we are truly approaching a historical “event horizon,” beyond which all extrapolations become meaningless.

On the other side of that divide, Kurzweil believes, the combined impact of genetics, nanotechnology, and informatics will bring about the birth of a radically transformed human species. Humans will redesign their own bodies and minds, using the powerful tools of genetics and nanotechnology; they will reverse-engineer the human brain, applying this knowledge to design new forms of artificial intelligence far more potent than any human mind; they will endow these superintelligent machines with bodies more capable and versatile than any mere biological being could ever hope to be. In this way, humankind will in effect be giving birth to its own successor species, our own technological progeny, whose limitless potential will take them out into the cosmos to fulfill a destiny greater than any of us today can fully comprehend. It will be a moment of species metamorphosis, a collective transformation akin to the transition from a caterpillar to a butterfly.11

Kurzweil is by no means alone in holding this view. His perspective is shared (to varying degrees) by the proponents of a loose cultural and philosophical current that has come to be known as transhumanism. The transhumanists have formed an organization to promote their ideas—Humanity Plus (or H+)—and though it currently has only some six thousand members worldwide, its influence has been growing rapidly.12 Many books and articles have been written over the past decade by philosophers, economists, technologists, journalists, or scientists who are engaging in one way or another with these kinds of ideas.13 I return to the transhumanist philosophy later, but I want to focus here on Kurzweil’s writings, for he is without a doubt the most influential exponent of this techno-enthusiastic current of thought about the future.

Kurzweil’s argument hinges on a single proposition: historical change and, particularly, technological change are dramatically speeding up, and the rate of acceleration is itself increasing exponentially as time goes by. Kurzweil calls this “the law of accelerating returns,” and in his book The Singularity Is Near, he provides an abundance of intriguing graphs and charts to make his case.14 But Kurzweil does not confine himself to modern technological progress: he also extends his “law of acceleration” to a much broader, more metaphysical scale. The history of life, he contends, consists of six major evolutionary epochs, each building on the ones before it and unfolding much faster than the last—from the elemental foundations of physical and chemical processes, to the advent of biological life, to the development of advanced neuronal structures like the human brain, to the rise of modern informatic technology. Extrapolating from these trends into the middle-term future, Kurzweil believes the next steps will involve the “merger of technology and human intelligence,” followed by the colonization of outer space by superintelligent beings that humans will soon be creating.15

I believe Kurzweil’s understanding of historical process and, therefore, his predictive model are deeply flawed. Nevertheless, clarifying the strengths and weaknesses in his argument can help us develop a more refined approach to thinking about the future of technology. Here, then, are three key problem areas in Kurzweil’s vision.16

First, history is jerkier, more discontinuous, than Kurzweil thinks. Kurzweil’s mistake lies in applying his model of accelerating change to historical process as if the passing of the years were a smooth, uniform, and linear phenomenon. But history does not work this way. Its myriad causal processes advance unevenly, with some of them surging steadily forward, others lurching spastically in fits and starts, still others stagnating or regressing—all at the same time.

He seems to conceptualize the major advances of the 1800s and 1900s as if they were stepping-stones in a great march of progress, with steadily increasing densities of change as the decades went by. According to this model, the technological stepping-stones in the 1970s should, in general, be much closer together than the stepping-stones in the 1940s. But this is demonstrably not true. In nuclear physics, for example, the advances of the 1940s were far more rapid and dramatic than those of the 1970s. Kurzweil’s concept of “acceleration” is therefore misleading, because it applies as a blanket generalization to all areas of historical change.

Second, history is messier, more interconnected and tangled, than Kurzweil thinks. Kurzweil places considerable weight on the synergies of technological change, as different domains of progress assist and boost each other, further fueling the advance of innovation. Unfortunately, he fails to take into account the obverse of this factor: many historical causal processes do not reinforce each other at all, but rather undermine, degrade, or even nullify each other. The technological writer Bob Seidensticker cites the example of aircraft technology to illustrate this point.17 Starting with the Wright brothers in 1903, airplanes went through five decades of exhilarating development, their rapidly evolving designs allowing ever greater distances to be traversed at ever higher speeds. If, in the year 1960, one had plotted these innovations on a graph and then projected that trend line into the future, one might reasonably have concluded that supersonic and perhaps even hypersonic aircraft would be the norm by the year 2000. But that is not what happened. Even though the scientific and engineering capabilities for super-sonic travel were solidly in place, society made a different choice. Instead of opting for “ever faster, ever higher,” it went for “gazillions of passengers, on the cheap.” As a result, our plot line of rising aircraft performance dramatically levels off in the 1960s, and remains more or less flat right through the next fifty years.

This is a very different sort of reality than the one depicted by Kurzweil in his graphs and projections. It is a world in which powerful social and economic factors—the oil crisis of the 1970s, the advent of mass air travel, the fickle tastes of consumers—all conspired to lead a particular technology down an unexpected path.

Third, technological advance is not inevitable. In Kurzweil’s model, the evolution of devices and machines is driven by two primary factors: the incessant demands of consumers for “more, better, faster,” and the ingenuity of scientists and technologists who scramble furiously to meet those demands. Taken together, these forces are so powerful that they render the advance of technological capabilities virtually unstoppable. Resistance is futile.

Most historians of technology, however, do not regard technological change in this manner—as an irresistible tide surging through history, engulfing all those who get in its way. Instead, they see technology and human choices constantly interacting with each other, shaping each other over time.18 No device exists in isolation from the social and cultural milieu in which it is conceived, designed, manufactured, and used. A hammer, a computer, a robot, an MRI machine—each of these exists as part of a broader system of functions, and those functions are all, without exception, socially determined.

In this picture, human choices play a much larger role than in Kurzweil’s. As in the case of the supersonic Concorde, it is quite possible for a majority of rational individuals in a democratic society simply to say no to one kind of progress in favor of another: “more” is not always better, and the most sophisticated technologies do not automatically and unavoidably triumph over the humbler ones. We therefore need to regard Kurzweil’s dazzling array of graphs and projections with a healthy dose of skepticism. There is nothing inevitable about our technological future.

For all these reasons, therefore, Kurzweil’s vision of an inexorably approaching Singularity is probably inaccurate. This does not mean, however, that his many conjectures about the future are worthless. On the contrary, he and his fellow transhumanists are very much on to something. They have made the empirical observation that science and technology are being turned with growing potency upon humans themselves; and they have concluded that this trend will raise increasingly pressing questions about who we are and what we may become. Both of these are reasonable assessments of where humankind now finds itself.

Our society has gradually put in place a complex and well-funded network of institutions specifically designed to generate rapid innovation in science and technology. In 1850, only 0.03 percent of the total US workforce was employed in fields of science, engineering, and technology; by 1950, this figure had multiplied thirty-six-fold, to 1.1 percent of the workforce; and by 2001, it had grown still further, to 4.2 percent.19 It is just as serious a mistake to underestimate the significance of this development as it is to exaggerate it. No civilization has ever devoted such vast human and financial resources to the accelerating development of technoscientific prowess.

In the domain of pharmaceuticals, we can now control which part of a chemical substance we wish to activate, and fine-tune the interaction between its molecules and our own cellular processes. Our bioelectronic prostheses are no longer like eyeglasses, adding an external layer to our senses: they now reach deep into our nervous system, changing how it performs in its fundamental workings. Today’s genetic interventions penetrate straight to the core, using detailed genomic maps to target specific sites in DNA and redirect their functions along the lines we desire. All these technologies have one key feature in common: they illustrate the directness with which humans can now manipulate the innermost workings of nature’s processes.

Even though these biotechnological innovations are not advancing smoothly, exponentially, or unstoppably, they are nonetheless harbingers of something big. Kurzweil and the transhumanists are right to get excited about them. This transformation will probably arrive piecemeal, in untidy increments and jumps, extending over a period of many decades through the middle of the twenty-first century. Our children and grandchildren will experience it directly.

TWO

Pharmaceuticals

O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick.

—William Shakespeare,Romeo and Juliet, Act V1

The concept of “human bioenhancement” is a slippery customer. Its purview ranges from minute adjustments in a person’s biochemistry (“I boosted my immune system by sucking on a zinc lozenge”) to wholesale redesign (“My latest enhancement package includes infrared vision, Google accessible by thought, and a 160-year health span”). It can refer to modifications of existing traits (“My memory has been far better since the doctors tweaked my hippocampus”) or to new capabilities that no human has ever possessed (“This gene retrofit for skin chlorophyll lets me absorb solar energy by photosynthesis”). In this book I adopt the following broad definition: a modification of a person’s biologically grounded traits, adding capabilities that would not otherwise have been expected to characterize that person.2

The three main categories of human enhancement—drugs, bioelectronics, and genetics—bear down upon us along different horizons of time. Major genetic interventions reside for the most part in the realm of future possibilities—perhaps twenty years away, perhaps even more—because the science undergirding them still remains relatively new and uncharted. Bioelectronics is keyed to a nearer future: we already possess functional devices today, such as brain-machine interfaces for the paralyzed and the blind, that presage significant breakthroughs in the conjoined fields of neuroscience and informatics within the next ten to twenty years.

Pharmaceutical enhancements, by contrast, are already very much part of our contemporary world—and have been for quite some time. I remember in 1966 hearing the new Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper” on the radio. Even as an eleven-year-old, I understood the song’s message: Mother wasn’t actually sick, but a little yellow pill would propel her through her hectic day. The Stones’ sardonic lyrics illustrate the extent to which a modest form of pharmacological enhancement had already become a widespread phenomenon by the 1960s.

In this chapter I briefly sketch the trajectory of our society’s use of such chemicals over the past century or so, focusing primarily on their use for enhancement purposes rather than therapeutic treatment (though the line between the two is often blurred in practice). Then, having completed this survey of past and present, I turn toward the prospects for chemical enhancement over the decades to come.

A HUNDRED YEARS OF PILL POPPING

Virtually all the statistics on pharmaceutical usage during the twentieth century indicate continual and dramatic growth. The variety of drugs available; quantities of pills taken per capita; number of individuals relying on medication; dollars spent on research, manufacturing, and advertising; as well as the level of cultural attention paid to chemical intervention—in all these areas the twentieth century can be described as a period of explosive expansion.3 The drugs themselves, moreover, have been getting ever more effective as time has gone by, becoming increasingly precise in achieving their stated purpose while minimizing unwanted side effects.4

A key phenomenon here is that of “medicalization”—the growing use of drugs for relatively common conditions such as lethargy, distractedness, or moroseness that would once have been considered mere character flaws.5 If you are very shy, for example, you can go to a psychiatrist, who may diagnose you with “social anxiety disorder.” You will then get a prescription for a drug like Nardil, which stands a good probability of making your shyness melt away like ice in the sun.6 A condition that would once have been regarded as a rather challenging facet of one’s personality, to be managed through self-discipline and grit, has now become a diagnosable disorder for which powerful medications can be prescribed.7 Pill popped, problem solved.

Taking drugs to tweak your physical or mental performance no longer bears the social stigma it once did. The scholar John Hoberman argues that a culture of “lifestyle medicine” has emerged over recent decades, a moral milieu in which individuals feel empowered to reengineer key aspects of their selfhood in line with idealized notions of their own potential. This trend applies not just to pharmaceutical enhancements such as steroids or hormones, but is also evident in the dramatic rise of cosmetic surgery, diet aids, body-building devices, sexual augmentation, and antiaging remedies that have become common aspects of today’s world.8 Many of these practices are now widely regarded as perfectly legitimate and reasonable avenues of self-improvement and self-fulfillment.9

Enhancement drugs can be divided into four broad groups, depending on whether the traits they modify are primarily physical, cognitive, or emotional in nature, or whether their target is the more global phenomenon of aging itself.

Physical traits

On September 21, 1998, the newspaper columnist Ann Landers printed a letter she had received from a group of elderly women in California about the newly released medication Viagra. The women, who called themselves the Senior Señoras in Sonoma, took a straw poll among themselves and reported the results: three of them stated that they enjoyed sex and welcomed their husbands’ use of the drug; eight of them begged to differ and hoped their husbands would not start taking it; another four went even further, making it clear that they had “endured” sex all their lives out of a sense of duty, but now wanted once and for all to be left in peace. They concluded their letter with the observation that “Viagra must have been invented by a man.”10

No enhancement, it turns out, is ever purely physical in nature: to paraphrase Freud, an erection is inevitably more than just an erection. Humans are cultural creatures, and all aspects of our bodily life are filtered through the sentiments and meanings with which we cannot help but imbue them. Hence, to the Senior Señoras, Viagra represented something quite different than it did to their menfolk: for most of these women, who believed in a certain “natural” progression of life stages, the drug became a royal pain in the neck, forcing them to renegotiate aspects of their identity that they had considered stable and resolved.11 All this, in a little blue pill.

The number and variety of such pharmaceuticals have been growing rapidly over recent decades. In the category of cosmetic enhancements, we find drugs for body building (anabolic steroids), shortness (human growth hormone), slimming (Xenical, Meridia, Belviq, and Qsymia), baldness (Propecia), and the elimination of wrinkles (“gene foods”).12 In the category of functional enhancements, we find drugs for athletic performance (erythropoietin, human growth hormone, androstenedione), heightened energy (amphetamines and their many derivatives), hormone replacement (estrogen, testosterone), and augmented sexual vigor (Viagra, Cialis, Levitra).

A skeptic might take the position that there is nothing really new going on here. As far back as the historical record can show, we find evidence of people in past civilizations using stimulants such as tea, coffee, tobacco, and coca to boost their energy levels, as well as other tisanes and dietary supplements to augment (or at least attempt to augment) various aspects of their physical performance. What is different today, however, is the potency with which these self-modifications can take place. Propecia, unlike the various snake oils of centuries past, really does compel the body to grow new hair. Erythropoietin, unlike the unguents and herbal infusions adopted by athletes in the past, triggers a major change in blood chemistry: the sudden profusion of invigorating red cells can render the blood so thick that it actually endangers the athlete’s life. Viagra incurred the ire of the Senior Señoras precisely because it worked extremely well.

The result, not surprisingly, has been a new level of social and cultural upheaval. In the world of competitive sports, for example, it is hard to find a serious commentator who does not believe the situation has reached a crisis point. World-class athletes forced to retire in disgrace; demoralization among the competitors; an ongoing arms race between regulatory bodies and the developers of illicit pharmaceuticals, as they struggle to stay ahead of each other—and no end in sight.13 A cloud of suspicion and confusion has fallen over the entire enterprise of competitive athletics, as both spectators and competitors are forced to confront thorny philosophical questions: What is sports really about? Is it about performance? About teamwork and self-discipline? About the cultivation of innate talent, or the bottom line of winning? One finds no easy answers here. What is clear is that these pharmaceuticals have already destabilized the moral frameworks surrounding one of the most ancient and beloved arenas of human social life.

Cognitive traits

“Viagra for the Brain,” run the headlines. “Smart pill.” “Neuroceuticals.” It is hard not to share the sense of giddy excitement that has surrounded the fields of augmented cognition, learning, and memory in recent years.14

1990: the neuroscientist Eric Kandel identifies a brain chemical known as CREB as a key factor in the processes of memory formation.151994: the neuroscientists Tim Tully and Jerry Yin alter the way CREB operates in a strain of fruit flies. The CREB-boosted flies learn new behaviors at rates up to ten times faster than their unmodified brethren. Other researchers later replicate these findings in mice.1999: Princeton neuroscientist Joe Tsien genetically engineers a strain of mice possessing extra copies of the NR2B gene, which regulates the activity of synaptic receptors in the brain. The NR2B-enhanced mice perform up to five times better than unmodified mice in tests of memory and learning.2000s: Several new drug companies race to apply these findings to humans. Memory Pharmaceuticals (founded by Kandel) and Helicon Therapeutics (founded by Tully) both have CREB-related medications going through clinical trials. Another company, Cortex Pharmaceuticals, is exploring a brain chemical known as ampakines, aimed at producing similar results through a different neural pathway.16

The notion of boosting memory in humans sounds at first like a terrific development. I would be able to learn foreign languages faster, recall more accurately the names of people and places I have known, find my car keys without a lot of cursing and fuss. But what about forgetting? When we examine the functioning of memory as a practical component in a person’s daily life, we find that it is just as important to be able to selectively lose information as it is to retain it. Without this ability, we would rapidly find ourselves drowning in a sea of trivial details, impressions, emotions, and images. When researchers seek to enhance the functioning of memory in humans, therefore, they will actually be required to do something far more complex than merely augmenting carrying capacity—as if they were doubling the size of a hard drive in a computer. Rather, they will need to boost carrying capacity, search-and-retrieval function, the ability to triage items according to importance, and the deletion function all at the same time—for this nexus of interconnected abilities is what we really mean by the word “memory” in the context of human awareness.17 This is obviously a much taller order than it at first appears.

Already, however, a first generation of “smart pills” beckons those citizens who would like to modify their cognitive profile.18 None of these chemicals was originally intended as an enhancement pharmaceutical: they were developed to help people with basic functional deficits, such as narcolepsy, extreme restlessness, or an inability to stay focused. Nevertheless, for many people who have no such deficits, they also seem to work remarkably well in boosting cognitive ability.

The most commonly used pharmaceuticals in this category are the stimulants Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Adderall (dextroamphetamine), which are widely prescribed for patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Ritalin has been in use since the 1960s, whereas Adderall came onto the market in 1996; both have relatively few side effects, though they are potentially habit forming if used over long periods. A related stimulant medication, Provigil (modafinil), developed in 1990, has met with considerable success in the treatment of narcolepsy and other sleep disorders.

When healthy people take one of these drugs, they tend to report two quite different kinds of results. Some find that the chemicals do little more than render them alert and focused over longer periods of time.19 But others encounter a quite different experience. Björn Stenger, a doctoral candidate in computer engineering at Cambridge University, took a single dose of modafinil as part of a research study. Within one hour, he observed, his attention and memory both seemed noticeably sharper. He then went on to perform at very high levels on a series of mental agility tests. Overall, he said, “if [my] brainpower would normally rate a ten, the drug raised it to fifteen. It was kind of fun.”20 Another person, who responded anonymously to a 2008 questionnaire on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education, affirmed that going on Adderall had changed his career: “I’m not talking about being able to work longer hours without sleep (although that helps). I’m talking about being able to take on twice the responsibility, work twice as fast, write more effectively, manage better, be more attentive, devise better and more creative strategies.”21 Here, in other words, it is the higher cognitive functions such as learning, memory, and insight that are purportedly being affected by these enhancement drugs.

Scientific assessments of these chemicals’ effectiveness have yielded similarly contradictory results. One study conducted in 2003 at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research concluded that the effects of modafinil on a person’s ability to function while sleep deprived were about the same as a high dose of caffeine.22 Another series of experiments, conducted at Cambridge University in 2001, reached a very different conclusion: after taking 200 milligrams of modafinil, test subjects “moved more smoothly from one task to the next and adjusted their strategies … with greater agility. In short, they worked smarter and were better at multi-tasking.”23

Given these conflicting conclusions, it would make good sense to withhold judgment about cognitive enhancers until the results of further research are in. But “wait and see” is clearly not what a great many people in today’s society are choosing to do: they are scrambling to get these drugs in any way they can, and the rates of illicit or off-label use in the United States over the past decade have been skyrocketing. Estimates vary: one 2011 survey concluded that on some campuses, up to 30 percent of students have been using cognitive enhancers on a fairly regular basis.24

Emotional traits

In the summer of 1996 the psychologist Jonathan Haidt did a little experiment on himself: he went on Paxil, a mood-altering drug similar to Prozac. He was not suffering from depression or any other debilitating condition, but he was curious to see what all the fuss over these kinds of drugs was about:

It was like magic. A set of changes I had wanted to make in myself for years—loosening up, lightening up, accepting my mistakes without dwelling on them—happened overnight. However, Paxil had one devastating side effect for me: it made it hard for me to recall facts and names, even those I knew well…. I decided that as a professor I needed my memory more than I needed peace of mind, so I stopped taking Paxil. Five weeks later, my memory came back, along with my worries. What remained was a firsthand experience of wearing rose-colored glasses, of seeing the world with new eyes.25

Haidt had been doing just fine in his life, but he wanted to see what it would mean to do “better than fine.” His story vividly raises the core issue surrounding the enhancement of human affect through pharmaceuticals: the question of authenticity. Which fellow is the real me? If Haidt had not encountered the side effect of poor memory and had therefore stayed on the drug (as he unabashedly affirmed he would have done), which man would have been the more authentic one: the anxious fellow coping as best he could with his tenure worries, or the cheery young professor heartily enjoying the early years of his career? Is there something inherently phony or disreputable about a state of lightheartedness attained through chemicals?

The bioethicist Leon Kass argues that the answer is definitely yes: “We want to perform better in the activities of life—but not by becoming mere creatures of our chemists or by turning ourselves into bionic tools designed to win and achieve in inhuman ways…. We want to be happy—but not by means of a drug that gives us happy feelings without the real loves, attachments, and achievements that are essential for true human flourishing.”26

The image Kass seems to have in mind here is Huxley’s Brave New World, with its masses placated by the drug soma, their lives repulsive to us in their drudgery and meaninglessness.27