Yes. There are now more World of Warcraft players in the US than farmers, thanks to mechanized agriculture. This led to a decrease in hours worked from about 80 to 40.
Mechanized factories led to a similar reduction; service workers tend to work far less than factory workers (spending several hours/day at work, but not working).
The rest of the productivity gains went to increased consumption, which tends to mean a greater quality of leisure (I enjoy playing video games much more than I would enjoy watching Big 3 TV networks in 1950).
Doping may lead to an increase in inequality (i.e., non-doped need to work harder to have the same stuff as the doped), but that's a different matter.
I mean, all the other chemicals we use to regulate the brain have worked out so well. Most of them haven't even turned out to be carcinogens, yet!
Sounds awesome.
Society will benefit from productivity gains. Some individuals might be harmed by a risk they chose to take. The article suggests that those undertaking those risks are intelligent and educated, so it's not even like poor fools are being taken advantage of. What's the problem?
Supposing that brain booster pills are as safe as working 80-100 hours/week between the ages of 22 and 41, would you accept that they should be legal and brought to market?
It's a totally false analogy. I code and break software for a living. I have a blast. Modafinil and aderrol sound like a blast, too. But 20 years from now, I expect to look back fondly on 80 hour work weeks, the way I look back on 2-hour-of-sleep nights with newborns. Unlike the drugs, those weeks won't have scorched my neurochemical pathways.
You talk as if you have some way of measuring the risk of these drugs, or as if the risk was fantastical. I'm not going to have to sound like a alt-med hippie to disprove that.
I'm not saying I know the risks of these drugs. I'm just saying that "my competitors might do it, and then I can't keep up" is a silly argument against them. There are all sorts of "natural" ways you can compete, many of which might be risky or harmful to you. One of those ways is working as hard as you do.
I don't think the risk is necessarily fantastical, though I suspect it is probably low. I simply think people should be allowed to take the risk if they want to.
With tech improving as fast as it is starting to do, the species really does need to take a more gung-ho attitude. Rush into the future, because the harm of the present can best be undone with technologies we don't have yet.
And it's not reasonable to fear the unknown on principle. Being "conservative" by avoiding an advance doesn't make sense in isolation. It might cause a problem. It also might solve one. We don't know that. We do know technology is useful.
But "gung ho" doesn't sound right. Sometimes we have a substantive idea about a way an upcoming technology could be dangerous. In that case we should respect and consider that foresight, not just charge forward anyway.
BTW David Deutsch's TED talk touches on this.
It's a bit like doing rewrites of major production systems. Not a good idea. But of course it's much worse because human culture is more complex than a computer program.
But also like major production systems, we definitely can improve them. Now we just need unit tests for cultures to make refactoring easier.
PS Have you read any Edmund Burke? Got an opinion of him?
It feels like regulations do well with medications that science understands. It does not understand modafinil well. What evidence do you have of "the odds" that it causes no permanent harm?
http://www.upliftprogram.com/depression_stats.html
(what's with all the pill popping pre-schoolers?)
I'm echoing the idea that increased production doesn't necessarily entail increased happiness due to second order effects.
One scenario: a lot of those WoW players can play so much because their parents have worked very hard. But, they play so much because they don't have good relationships with their parents, since their parents spent so much time working hard.
Then there is the issue of whether the level of production is sustainable, and what happens to a society dependent upon such activity if it stops or slows. Also, what kind of class attitudes develop with the societal stratification.