The savage solution: Don't be fooled by those who want to create super-humans - soon we'll all have to follow

London Guardian
Feb. 28, 2006

If I were to tell you that there are a bunch of people who want to turn you into a machine, you'd probably think I was crazy. But if you don't believe me, read the report published this month by Demos and the Wellcome Trust, ominously titled Better Humans?. The authors of this collection of essays wax lyrical about the imminent arrival of a range of technologies that they claim will change human nature itself, and for the better. Memory-enhancing drugs, genetic selection of children, neural implants and dramatic increases in life expectancy are not only genuine possibilities, they argue, but possibilities we should pursue and embrace.

These ideas are no longer mere thought-experiments. Some of these technologies already exist, while others are perhaps less than a decade away. Demos and the Wellcome Trust are right to call for a public debate about these developments before the genie is completely out of the bottle; but the air of technological utopianism that pervades the report is not a good basis for a balanced discussion.

Several contributors to the report are no better than the bioconservative extremists they criticise. In the past few years pundits such as Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama, and Bill McKibben have argued for global bans on new human-enhancement technologies. The techno-utopians are right to criticise the authoritarian nature of such restrictions, but they often fail to see how their calls for individual choice on such matters might pose equal risks for freedom.

It is all very well to argue that people should have broad discretion over which technologies to apply to themselves, and that parents should decide which reproductive technologies to use when having children. But this ignores the phenomenon of technological drift. What starts out as a luxury often ends up becoming a necessity.

We saw this process occur over and over again, and at an ever increasing rate, during the past century. Cars, computers and mobile phones were, when first introduced, optional extras; now many people could not manage without them. There is no reason to expect that smart drugs, genetic selection of children and neural implants will be any different.

Take the development of smart pills to enhance concentration and memory for example. Demos suggests that such drugs might be regulated through an anti-doping agency to prevent cheating in the education system. It is hard enough to spot chemically assisted athletes, but these difficulties pale into insignificance beside the technical and ethical problems involved in testing millions of children for drug use before exams. It would not be long before people gave up weeding out the drug-users, and simply made the exams harder. Choice would then have effectively vanished: to have any chance of passing, you would have to take the memoryboosters. As we have seen with computers, the problem with new technology is not that it remains in the hands of the elite; it is that, sooner or later, everyone is forced to adopt it.

So how can we preserve freedom of choice? Bioconservatives and technophiles are united in their distaste for the future society imagined by Aldous Huxley in Brace New World, but they both ignore the one redeeming feature of that nightmare vision - the savage reservations. Here, in the remote wilderness, an ancient society has been allowed to live according to its own rules. Freed from the oppressive technologies that regulate life in the World State, the inhabitants develop individuality, independent thinking and initiative.

If we do not allow such refuges from modern technology to persist, we are in danger of creating a society even less tolerant than that envisaged by Huxley.

· Dylan Evans is a senior lecturer at the University of the West of England