Will human enhancement make us better?
THE FLIP SIDE of the steroid scandal in baseball is last week's announcement of the first cloned dog. Ballplayers are punished for using pharmaceutical technologies to improve their physical abilities, while scientists are rewarded for pushing toward a similar goal -- in the words of artificial intelligence techno-visionary Ray Kurzweil, "reverse engineering our biology and then reprogramming it."
Biological engineering is not just about curing disease anymore. The incentives and profits are moving toward drugs, gene therapies and other technologies to enhance human performance -- memory, creativity, concentration, strength, endurance, longevity. Asking athletes not to partake of these advances is not just hypocritical, it's likely to be increasingly futile.
Speaking last week in a television interview, Kurzweil defined humanity as "the species that goes beyond our limitations." Of course, in that quest we are also the species that has come close to immolating the planet (during the Cold War), destroying our environment and ruining baseball.
But if we are to believe scientists and technologists, nothing but good can come from human-performance enhancement. As a 2002 report of the normally staid National Science Foundation proclaimed, the 21st century "could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment," all through research on human-performance enhancement.
I participated in some of the meetings that led to that report. Most of the attendees were highly intelligent white males who worked in the semiconductor industry, at national weapons laboratories or major research universities. At one point, the group got to talking about how we might soon achieve brain-to-brain interfaces that would eliminate misunderstandings among humans. Instead of having to rely on imperfect words, we would be able to directly signal our thoughts with perfect precision.
I asked how such enhanced abilities would get around differing values and interests. For instance, how would more direct communication of thought help Israelis and Palestinians better understand one another? Unable to use the ambiguities and subtleties of language to soften the impact of one's raw convictions, might conflict actually be amplified? A person at one of the meetings acknowledged he "hadn't thought about values," while another suggested that I was being overly negative. What seemed clear was that the group's homogeneity made it impossible for it to scrutinize the assumptions beneath its rosy vision of "performance enhancement."
