Chapter 15 - Human Enhancement

A lot of interesting questions were raised in this chapter.  Woodhouse states that he doesn’t want humans to become something that isn’t human.  But where exactly is this line?  On page 206, he writes, “…if it became routine for people to live 150 years or more, I’d have to acknowledge that something pretty significant had changed.”  But hasn’t something pretty significant already changed, given that current life expectancy in the US is around 75 years?  At one point, humans used to live only around 30 years.

I am also uncomfortable with too much human enhancement, but it’s difficult to say why.  I’m concerned about what the effects on humanity and culture would be.  I’m thinking of stories like Gattacca, where parents choose their children’s genes, and children who are conceived accidentally become second-class citizens barred from many opportunities.  There is also much potential for people who are already rich and privileged to obtain human enhancements, while leaving others as they are, widening the already huge difference between “haves” and “have-nots.”  In fact, considering that we are currently unable to ensure that everyone has food and clean water, it’s certain that distribution of human enhancement would be unfair.

Also, what would enhancement do to the human experience?  Computers, cell phones, and the internet have restructured our lives in significant ways.  Many of these ways are positive, in that they allow us to communicate and coordinate more easily.  But other ways are negative – they encourage people to forsake face-to-face interaction, and they negatively affect people’s ability to focus (permanently, if the person is very young).  They cause people to dissociate with real life and with sensory stimuli.  I take a weekly 25-hour break from electronics as per the rules of the religion I’m part of, but most people to don’t have that sort of structure to align to (or worse, don’t even realize the detriments of being constantly connected to electronics).  Electronics are becoming more and more present in every moment of our lives, first with smartphones and now with Google Glass.  Soon, people may decide that they want implants, and I think that that would be very bad.  I think there is a great deal of value to the ability to interact with our environment without anything acting as an intermediary or distraction.

The situation, however, is different for those for whom an intermediary is necessary; that is, people with disabilities.  If a bionic eye or brain implant could help a blind person to see, I think that would be good.  However, my conviction on this makes me question my earlier conviction – have a simply selected an “appropriate” level of human ability (the one we are at right now) and declared that anything beyond that is not okay?  I’m not sure. 

Our lives have changed greatly in the millennia that homo sapiens has existed, to the point that someone from 10,000 BCE likely would not consider our current lifestyle as a human lifestyle according to how they understand it.  But I believe a line is crossed when we go from external things that affect our lives to things that are part of our physical bodies.  Because we can still choose to get away from our modern conveniences and go backpacking in the woods.  However, even so, our brains have been affected by the lifestyles we lead, so maybe we are already, for better or for worse, enhanced humans.