Survey Suggests a Public Wariness of Enhanced Humans
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In their minds, it is the doctors/scientists that are most excited about the possibilities / opportunities afforded by offering something as soon as possible to the public, as if we could all be further guinea pigs for them, or as if it would make them rich personally, or that they are motivated primarily by the satisfaction of knowing the fruits of their labor were put to use.
Those are certainly some of many valid motivations for people working in intellectual fields. But it is interesting the public does not understand that doctors/scientists are more likely to be reluctant to turn findings into products, instead preferring to follow the new research opportunities and/or building a community or consensus.
It is a different kind of professional that turns scientific innovation into potential products (engineers, entrepreneurs, marketers, bad journalists), and along that spectrum is the increased rushed, cavalier attitude.
This distinction is lost on those surveyed.
Which it really doesn't.
To me, sensory enhancements are different--less creepy--than cognitive enhancements.
Short answer it's in the best of the cases a 0 sum game.
They seemed to agree that they were interpreted as an electrical signal and didn't have anything to do with the organ itself, as when you see in your dreams.
Based on that I disagree with you anything as being processed by the brain affected by tech outside our natural capabilities should qualify as sensory and not cognitive enhancement....
will search for the pdf... right now this just qualify as "expert logic fallacy"
update: even when I'm extremely tempted to agree with you...
edit2: pdf here http://open-mind.net/collection.pdf
Regarding cognition I would say there are only hacks and are as messy as spaghetti over an open heart surgery; the thing is the brain is the result of the two opposing forces that are "more intelligence better tools" and "more intelligence more energy". Check https://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics incredible post.
No one's afraid of someone with the equivalent of built-in glasses or hearing aids. What worries them is the prospect of someone with superhuman mental ability. The potential to create a permanent underclass is obvious.
We already have a semi-permanent underclass based on (among other things) poor access to decent education, something which is supposedly guaranteed by law in the US. Imagine how much worse that will get if we don't even pretend that augmentation is a universal right, but let the free market charge for it instead.
Suppose we developed a brain-thought-stream to digital record and back again machine. A computer chip with a neural lace covering the brain. Then when you wanted extremely accurate recall you could have it.
Would this be acceptable to you instead of genetic enhancement which improved native memory?
The thing is... if you think alike checking your responses history I could grab an idea on how I "theoretically" behave under those scenarios..... interesting...
PS: Even more broadly tools are enhancement beyond the norm. IE: It's much easier to win a fight while holding a stick vs. bare handed.
This is weird. Making a permanent non-consensual change versus something like an implant. I have to chalk that up to not really thinking about the question that hard. Is there some angle I'm missing here why the first would be better?
Implants that change the way we think and interpret the world are a much bigger leap. They challenge our sense of self and identity. Am I still "me" if my cognitive abilities are modified? I totally get why that's a much more uncomfortable topic.
There are other advantages, too: If the safety of Roundup is called into question, just make humans Roundup-Ready(tm).
Edit:
As bogus as it is, also IQ has been increased.
(Bite the IQ bullet or don't; going half way and then flip-flopping back and forth is intellectually dishonest.)
Additionally: "enhancement" seems like a bit of a bucket word. There are only a surface similarities between cellphones and AIDS cures, in that they help people. I mean, vaguely speaking, you're pushing the bounds of what humans are able to do; recall information more effectively, live longer, maybe fight disease. But then you end up broadening the category to "all technologies serve as enhancements" and vice versa, which stops describing the specific information that causes some people to be uncomfortable when they hear "enhancement".
I would want to know what connotations about the word enhancement produce a split between the religious vs non-religious, and the spiritual vs the non-spiritual (the two are independent but correlated dimensions, believe me.) In this article the argument has been framed around "meddling with nature" which itself is kind of limiting the discourse. There's probably more to it.
This is exactly the same way "Enhanced Humans" are going to play out as well. The public is going to be freaked out, but some people will do it anyway. Either locally, or in some foreign country. With time, people will realized that these "Enhanced Humans" are their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and perfectly good people, and their barriers will start dropping. And when the time comes when they have the opportunity to enhance their baby's health/intelligence/fitness, they'll think it's plain irresponsible of them not to do so.
Unless you're worried about regulatory bans, "public fears" are pretty much meaningless. If you can build it, show that it's safe, and demonstrate compelling benefits, the public will change their minds soon enough.
My fear is that, an "enhanced" human will significantly outperform it's peers and thus will gain advantage in all aspects of life, that is the point after all. Those advantages will be seen as unearned and thus the "losers" will become jaded and blame the technology - or rather the person's access to it. Someone who was conceived in vitro doesn't pose a threat to it's peers from the perspective of abilities by virtue of being in vitro.
Just like you see jealously now for disparities in abilities, I worry it will be magnified once people start upgrading.
That's without even getting into the "who can afford to upgrade" part of it.
Once the genie is out of the bottle, people will realize they can only fight it for so long. At some point, people will realize that if you can't beat 'em, they might as well join 'em.
Target the people enhancing for discrimination. I mean just look at the state of transgender relations now with targeted bans and targeted murders etc... That's not even someone gaining an advantage - it's just latent fear about differences.
Imagine instead if a trans-HUMAN is threatening your livelihood.
I don't think it's going to be pretty honestly - but in the end I think the upgraders will win.
A transhuman could start a start-up and make a better product than a team of normal humans.
Which product will the customers buy?
Testing a large enough population would take generations.
The term for this is "technical debt", you deliver when it works but have a debt for fix until it's good enough.
"would you want the same situation to be applied to say, genetic engineering?"
World works on this premise, every drug for every ailment has a secondary effect.
Truth be told now that you bring in the drug metaphor I'm torn, because I've been recently convinced that there are opportunity costs and institutional inefficiencies that come from being too risk averse on the drug market. So I would believe that tolerating some error, i.e. some casualty or someone's death, could on average be OK if more people were saved. This is a part of what we mean when we say we're OK with secondary effects in drugs. Usually the prescription ensures that the worst won't happen.
There might be differences to tease out between this example and genetic engineering, however. If a drug fails, you kill off a couple of people and make recalls. But these deaths happen more-or-less independently. The same goes with some software systems that tolerate error: so what if your shitty exercise app goes dark? Or, so what if a single consumer doesn't get served? You lose some money but life goes on. No one dies or no one gets cancer.
The reason why dealing with genetics is more scary, and this applies to manufacturing retroviruses, is that the error can spread or be transferred more effectively than in the case of drugs, whose sale is tightly controlled and whose information doesn't propagate. A virus spreads or a seed scatters or a person breeds and you end up exploring new unexpected territory. This isn't bad per se. But it's harder to control. If I were to deal with that kind of thing I would attempt to see what was invariant with scale and see if I could test on that case, so that if a spread did occur, the "patterning of the network" would be sound (like designing a component of a fractal).
On the other hand, Apple managed to make wearing iDweebs (their headphones) cool through advertising and branding.
grrrrrr
We just think prayers ain't gonna cut it.