The Brain Spa
A new world is opening up. No matter what ails us--depression, jitters, tremors, sleeplessness, anxiety--we'll be able to fix it, patch it, reverse it, whatever. It's especially useful for those whose careers are being affected by their ailments--or natural limitations. Just go to a brain spa and get the pills. It's the new performance enhancer. Link. Excerpts:
[Neurologist Anjan] Chatterjees point is that we already live on the threshold of a world in which widely available pharmaceuticals can and do enhance human performance. "This is coming regardless of your view of whether or not this is a good world, a bad world or somewhere in between," he declared.
Nevertheless, some people do object to using enhancement drugs. For instance, opponents often argue that they pose a kind of tragedy of the commons in which people who would otherwise not take enhancement drugs will feel forced to do so just to keep up with their competitors. But those kinds of pressures have always existed. Today, people get graduate degrees, buy new computers, and so forth to keep up. It's hard to see how using safe drugs to enhance performance is much different. I suspect that pharmacological enhancement will be more popular than, say, graduate school, since most of what will be involved is taking a pill with one's morning coffee. However, even in the era of pharmacologic enhancement, there will be some people–even as there are today–who choose to drop out of what they regard as the rat race and live less competitively and ambitiously.
Chatterjee cited an interesting poll in which people were asked whether they would give a safe drug to a child that would enhance his or her ability to learn to play the piano if they had the opportunity. Half of the respondents said absolutely not. They regarded learning the piano through persistent practice as character building and using pills as a cheat. However, the other half had no problem at all with giving kids a piano pill. What sets the stage for social and political conflict over enhancement technologies is that people on both sides in the poll were completely convinced that their view would be shared by everybody.
What's your gut reaction to this? It might speak volumes about whether you're a technocrat or traditionalist (which is our inadequate attempt to divide the populace into different blocks, since the labels of "conservative" and "liberal" are becoming obsolete and confusing). Are you a person inclined toward the belief that a free market, driven by technology and liberated from restrictions imposed by caution and uncertain side effects, will handle everything just fine? Or are you a person inclined to think we need to restrict ourselves a bit and that unrestrained technology could bring problems that exceed its benefits? That is probably where the political dividing line will be drawn.
