Put down that keyboard,
and prepare to be wired directly into the on-coming World Wide Mind.  Can’t
control your computer cursor by your thoughts alone? Just you wait — but maybe
not for long.

These are just two of the tantalizing
possibilities explored in Naam’s informative, lucid and strikingly balanced
defense of human technological enhancement. Naam’s title is somewhat
misleading, as he examines prospects not only for biological but also for
cybernetic expansions of human capacities. Among potential biological up-grades
he includes designer muscles, enhanced immune function, nerve restoration, and
aging retardants aimed at "compressed morbidity," i.e. at extending
not the human life span but the human health span.  Indeed, here
he approvingly cites researchers who see aging less as a biological
inevitability to be endured than as an engineering problem to be solved.

Yet as attention grabbing as that
view may seem, it pales in comparison to Naam’s vision of a fully wired brain
including neural prostheses that would permit seamless brain-to-brain
communication and even allow our thoughts to act directly upon physical
objects.  

Naam recognizes that the
technologies he describes may seem the stuff of science fiction, and repeatedly
acknowledges that some of them may never come to pass. At the same time, his
predictions are based largely on current research, and most strikingly on the
economic imperatives driving the development of these potential technologies. 
He also maintains that such research under-scores the utter vanishing point between
therapies and enhancements. Here, he cites examples like designer muscles and nerve
regeneration, initially conceived to combat (age-related) muscle wasting and
paralysis respectively, but now seen also as potential means to enhance human
athletic potential and nerve function.

Naam’s point here is not simply
that we cannot draw any clear distinction between therapeutic and enhancement
technologies. Rather, he turns completely on its head the argument, often
advanced by conservative bioethicists, that we must restrict ourselves to
therapeutic interventions, lest we submit to the tyranny of unintended
consequences. Quite the contrary, Naam argues, many ostensibly failed
interventions — witness Viagra’s birth as a prospective baldness cure — prove
both therapeutic and enhancing precisely on the basis of their unintended —
though not always unwelcome — consequences.    

Moreover, if we could compress
morbidity, would that qualify as curing a disease, i.e. aging, or as enhancing
human capacities? Naam’s response here is two-fold. First, he points out, many
critics of such prospects raise safety or equity concerns. Yet while they
consider the economic cost of access to these technologies, they ignore the 
potential costs of increased morbidity given a rapidly aging demographic.
Indeed, he suggests, on that basis, we cannot afford to delay developing these
technologies. At the same time, while Naam does not dismiss critics’ safety
concerns, he does point out that in debates surrounding issues like cloning,
embryo selection, and enhancement of our cognitive capacities, safety concerns
quickly give way to nebulous fears about losing human identity. Here, Naam
takes to task those who would ban the development of such technologies or
restrict individuals’ use of them.  As the title of his closing chapter, "Life
without Limits," suggests, he has little patience for conservative social
critics who insist that human nature is "good enough" as is, and that
any efforts to modify that nature bereft us of human dignity or human worth.

Quite the contrary, Naam insists;
we are not defined by our limits. The very idea of any biological creature
being good enough is nonsense from an evolutionary perspective; it equally
flouts the history of human evolution, throughout which we have always used
increasingly sophisticated tools to enhance ourselves. For Naam, "If our
limits define us, then we stopped being human a long time ago, when we invented
tools and language and science that extended the powers of our minds and bodies
beyond those our hunter-gather ancestors were born with" (227).  Rather,
he proposes, the "cognitive niche" we occupy on our evolutionary
path, amid which "we alone possess the power to guide our own development,"
and "to alter our own minds and bodies and those of our children,"
supports precisely the opposite conclusion, i.e. "Never to say enough,
always to want more — that is what it means to be human" (228).      

Naam’s conclusion, that these
powers hold out the prospects of a "new genesis" that may yield
descendants who differ from us "in ways we cannot imagine," will
excite some readers, appall others, terrify some, hearten others.  Yet despite
his optimism, he’s no techno-utopian, nor does he expect his readers to be. His
language may seem somewhat hyperbolic, but that largely as a counter to the
apocalyptic dystopias — the bestiary of   clones run amok and mutant cyborgs —
with which conservative bioethicists have populated the popular imagination. The
future will decide which of these groups engages more in flights of science
fiction.

In the meantime, Naam’s book will
prove immensely informative and rewarding to any reader seeking an over-view
both of what human enhancements may be coming, and of the ethical debates
surrounding their development and use. This book is exceptionally well-written,
allowing those with no scientific training to understand the scientific and
engineering bases — in current research and production – behind the future
technologies he envisions. His work makes readily accessible both the
possibilities these technologies hold open, and the technical (and social) challenges
their development poses. His arguments are well balanced, effectively detailing
and supporting the bases for his disagreements with conservative opponents.
Whatever one’s ultimate views on those matters, his text is a model of clarity
and sound reasoning in a field often astonishingly lacking in both. It is
almost unique in being rooted both in the science and in the theory — ethical,
social, political and economic — of these debates, and in the skill with which
it conveys complex ideas in ways that enhance the reader’s understanding both
of the science and of the social stakes these debates involve.   

© 2006 Lisa Bellantoni

Lisa Bellantoni is an Assistant
Professor of Philosophy at Albright College. She teaches normative and applied
ethics with an emphasis on emerging technologies. She is the author of Moral
Progress (SUNY, 2000) and several articles on bioethics, and welcomes
correspondence at Swamper99@aol.com. 

Categories: Ethics