Icarus 2.0: 
      Technology, Ethics, and the Quest to Build a Better Human

            This book project is about the ethical and social implications of new technologies for human biological enhancement – the reconfiguring and boosting of our physical and mental capabilities. The technologies of human enhancement are developing ever more rapidly, along three major fronts: pharmaceuticals, prosthetics/informatics, and genetics. Over the coming decades, these technologies will reach into our lives with increasing force: it is likely that they will shake the moral foundations on which contemporary civilization rests, and raise profound questions about what it means to be human. 

            The goal of this book is threefold: to assess the major areas in which this destabilization will occur; to explore the assumptions about human identity prevalent among those who are addressing this emergent phenomenon, both inside and outside of academia; and to propose strategies for responding constructively to these developing technologies as they come into being.

            My book will fall into two parts. In the first half, I will offer the reader a tour d’horizon of the three principal domains of enhancement science, charting the recent history of these three domains, and surveying the range of expert views about their projected future development.

 

 1. Pharmaceuticals

            People are using chemicals in increasingly sophisticated and powerful ways to reshape their bodies and minds. Behavioral traits such as distractedness and short attention span, which used to be treated as problems of character and will power, are now being medicalized, and redefined as treatable illnesses for which potent pharmaceuticals like Ritalin can be prescribed. Conditions such as depression, which used to be approached through endless hours on the psychiatric couch, are increasingly being handled through the administration of an ever-growing array of neurotransmitters, hormones, and other mood-altering chemicals. As Carl Elliott describes it in his book, Better than Well, we are engaged today in a sort of chemical arms race, seeking to push our own physical and mental abilities to ever higher levels. 

 

2. Prosthetic/informatic boosting

            A second important area of human enhancement lies in the field of neuroscience and its intersection with the technologies of prosthetics, robotics, informatics, and artificial intelligence. In 2002, for example, the brain researcher William Dobelle created a media sensation by partially restoring sight to a fully blind patient. Dobelle implanted electrodes in the man’s visual cortex and linked them through a portable computer to a tiny video camera mounted on the man’s glasses: the result was grainy blurred vision – but vision nonetheless. Dr. Dobelle’s blind patients could see well enough to drive a car around a parking lot (slowly!) and carry out simple everyday tasks. Over the next few decades, these kinds of human-machine functional hybrids will become more and more a part of our lives. We are gaining ever more sophisticated understanding of how the human brain works, how the nervous system and sensory organs function; we are building ever more powerful robotic and informatic devices; and, most significantly, we are getting better and better at linking these two realms, human and machine, and teaching them to work as one. 

 

3. Genetics.

            Direct intervention at the level of the human genome is potentially the most powerful form of enhancement, because it can modify not just individual humans in the here and now, but entire lineages of humans down through the generations. In 1999, a biologist at Princeton, Joe Tsien, modified a single gene in laboratory mice, the gene that controls production of a chemical known as NGF, or nerve growth factor. Tsien tweaked the gene so that it boosted the production of NGF. To his astonishment, the NGF-enhanced mice performed up to five times better than normal mice in tests of memory, learning, and intelligence. Other biologists such as Eric Kandel and Tim Tully have tinkered with a different gene, responsible for the production of a chemical that strengthens brain synapses: through genetic manipulation they have significantly boosted the learning abilities of mice, fruit flies, and sea slugs.

            This does not mean that genetic enhancement of human intelligence is just around the corner. It does, however, point to a conclusion that should get our full attention: the basic science and applied technology that will enable genetic enhancement of basic human traits are advancing at an accelerating pace. Over the coming decades, our society is going to face some very tough choices about whether to use, and how to use, these extraordinary genetic powers. Depending on which expert opinion one accepts, the time frame for this development is probably a matter of two to five decades.

 

            Part II of my book will address the humanistic implications of these technological advances. Four main questions will frame my analysis.

 

1. Can society control enhancement science?

            A key premise of this study is that the technologies for repairing a malfunctioning human body are inseparable from the technologies that allow us to push human capabilities to ever higher levels. For example, the same kinds of medical procedures that today permit gene therapy for persons with autoimmune disease can also be used, down the road, to modify or boost other genetic traits. Thus, where we can repair or heal, we can increasingly also modify, tweak, boost, redesign.

            The implications are sobering. Let us suppose that a majority of U.S. citizens were to decide today that human enhancement is a bad road, and that our society should refuse to go down it. Could we stop this process, even if we wanted to? Probably not. A ban on enhancement would prove ineffectual unless it severely curtailed research in most major fields of contemporary science, technology, and medicine – in all the world’s nations simultaneously. The chances of such a coordinated global relinquishment happening are very small indeed. 

            Nevertheless, to admit that we cannot stop these technologies altogether does not mean that we are powerless to exert any control at all over their development. A key focus of my book will be to explore how a democratic polity can realistically expect to manage, or channel, the powerful social, economic, and cultural processes that propel the technologies of human enhancement.

 

2. Can we avoid the commodification of humans?

            Enhancement technologies pose a serious risk to human dignity, precisely because they tempt us to think of a person as an entity that can be “improved.” The great danger, in doing this, lies in reducing a human person to the same status as any product or artifact. We have already seen, with the eugenics movements of the past century, where such dehumanizing lines of thought can lead. A basic question I will explore is how to prevent the technologies of enhancement from eroding the foundations of equality and human dignity on which our political and social systems rest. 

 

3. Can enhancement opportunities be made democratically accessible to all?

            If wealthy persons gain preferential access to the most potent enhancements, we will witness a further widening of the already cruel gap that separates people into haves and have-nots. This time around, however, that gap will not merely be reflected outwardly in social status and power: it will be written in biology itself. What kinds of political and economic safeguards will be required in order to prevent such an outcome?

 

4. Can our society deal constructively with radical diversity?

            It is not at all clear whether a population of highly enhanced humans can coexist peacefully alongside a population of unmodified humans. If human enhancement becomes widespread, then the people of that era will not only look far more different from each other than they do today, they will also possess a much wider variety of physical and mental powers. Diversity, in such a context, will be based on varying biologies, dissimilar machine components, sharply contrasting abilities. Will we have a civic culture that can absorb that level of riotous heterogeneity among its members? What ethical and political innovations would such a culture require?

 

The audience I have in mind for this book is a broad one: general educated readers who are concerned about the role of science and technology in shaping our collective future; legislators, ethicists, business leaders, and other policymakers with a stake in the governance of science; medical, scientific, and technological practitioners interested in the social and cultural reception of their research. Having taught three undergraduate honors seminars on this topic (in 2002, 2004, and 2007), I intend to produce a book that can be widely used in college-level classes on philosophy, history, or "science and society," as well as in more specialized courses on bioethics, the sociology of science, or the history of technology.

 

 

 

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