Will we still be human after tomorrow's technologies have programmed, drugged and engineered us into healthier, longer-living, more athletic and hard-to-offend creatures?
“Be careful what you wish for” is an old maxim and highly relevant to our times. Cyborg-style man-machine interfaces, genetic enhancements and mind-altering drugs appear to offer unprecedented opportunities for humankind to realise dreams of longer, happier and more accomplished lives.
Even making the big assumption that the technologies work in the narrowest sense – without horrible side-effects of the kind that killed Dolly the cloned sheep – tomorrow’s technologies come with grave social dangers:
- What new inequalities will they wreak?
- Will a person’s good characteristics be lost as his bad characteristics are chemically suppressed?
- And, most crucially of all, what kind of societies will the new technologies shape?
Each of these three questions are briefly discussed below.
New inequalities?
Most contemporary debates focus on the ability of new technologies to treat disease or disability. But technologies used to combat weaknesses can often be employed to enhance otherwise average attributes. Drugs like Ritalin, for example - designed to increase the attentiveness of easily distracted schoolchildren - can be used to enhance the performance of ‘normal’ kids. A parent who shuns mind-enhancing drugs or muscle-building implants for their Billy might think again when other parents are buying them for Billy’s super-performing classmates.
These new technologies have enormous implications for social justice - within, and between, countries. They could also create new divides between generations. The factory children of today may be outperformed by the factory kids of tomorrow as technologies expand and moral limits retreat.
Flat people?
Philosopher Francis Fukuyama, a member of the US government’s bioethics commission, has pondered the possible side-effects of overcoming negative character traits. If we had conquered the violent side of our character would we, he wondered, be able to defend ourselves? If feelings of jealousy could be overcome, would we still protect what we had? If treatments were available to forget bad experiences, would we become cavalier towards activities only likely to cause future hurt? If Holocaust survivors had been able to swallow a mind-erasing pill, would our culture also have lost sensitivity to history’s greatest crime (and its causes)?
A report from President Bush’s bioethics council – entitled ‘Beyond Therapy’ - wondered if tomorrow’s world “could rather resemble the humanly diminished world portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s novel ‘Brave New World’”? The “technologically enhanced inhabitants” of Huxley’s nightmare world lived “cheerfully, without disappointment or regret, “enjoying” flat, empty lives devoid of love and longing, filled with only trivial pursuits and shallow attachments”.
Distorted societies?
All new technologies alter society and tomorrow’s scientific possibilities could be revolutionary.
- The opportunity cost of technology fixes is real fixes. A drugged schoolchild might stop disrupting the classroom but why was he being disruptive? Was he being ill-served by the curriculum? Will his problems at home ever be addressed now?
- Technologies that offer increased life expectancy might reduce fertility. This inverse relationship between longevity and fertility has been documented in the ‘Beyond Therapy’ report. Extended families could contract further in size and societies become slower and more risk-averse. Big questions are also raised by a distorted ageing process. Will the periods of working life and retirement lengthen in similar proportions? Will the dying process be longer, too? What will these changes mean for the demographic timebomb?
- Even bigger changes are posed by the factory children revolution. Will people continue to conceive naturally if artificial methods are the only sure way of engineering the ‘minimum specification kids’ that tomorrow’s society might require? Just as voluntary euthanasia mutates into a duty-to-die, so the option of enhancing embryos might become a duty to abort or engineer socially-desirable embryos.
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This definition has presented a sceptical view of tomorrow’s technologies. The fears expressed on this page may be exaggerated but they deserve to be addressed by the scientists trying to rush society towards acceptance of their experiments. To date the bewildering complexity of tomorrow’s technologies has escaped serious ethical scrutiny. This is particularly true in Britain. Britain is closer to repressive nations like China in its attitudes to controversial sciences such as human cloning. The US and UK may be allied in the war on terror but (conservative) America and Old Europe have a similarly principled approach to embryo research and other forms of experimentation on human life.
I should note that real longevity treatments, of the type posited by Aubrey De Grey, are not about extending the time when you're old (and retired, and expensive) but about extending the time when you're young (and earning, and healthy). That is, the effect of longevity on the demographic time bomb would be to stop it dead, by removing the whole concept of "the elderly" and replacing it with "people who need some medical treatment to get back into work".
Posted by: Julian Morrison | August 27, 2006 at 03:36 PM