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Comment by michaereyess | Hacker News Reader

tl:dr :

Do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less?

The more different you are, the more valuable you become.

My particular area of research and development is cognitive neuroprosthetics: devices that directly interface with the brain to improve our memory, attention, emotion, and much more.

How can we respect someone's humanness while also giving them the choice to become more like the majority of humans?

In a world that values difference, untypical humans paired with neuroprosthetics might become even more powerful than fully abled ones.

If these kinds of augmentations can lift them above the crowd, soon everyone will want to be more than human.

It's seductively easy to imagine a world in which we're a little smarter or a bit more creative, in which our kids have the latest advantage.

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>Do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less?

Most people don't even know what human means, this idea of superpowers affecting your humanity just means you didn't grow beyond comic book stories.

>The more different you are, the more valuable you become.

Only in blind people's eyes who can not even see that every atom in this Universe is unique. How can you be more (or less) different than that?

>How can we respect someone's humanness while also giving them the choice to become more like the majority of humans?

There is no majority, only individuals. It's just an image in your mind if you travel around the world a bit you will see how limited this is.

>In a world that values difference

Maybe it's time to stop calling your neighborhood a world? :)

>It's seductively easy to imagine a world in which we're a little smarter or a bit more creative, in which our kids have the latest advantage

Kids have an advantage in every generation. The question is how being a little smarter or creative is going to make you happier? The story tries to connect this to being different, "above the crowd". But if everyone is above the crowd then there is no crowd and nobody will look up to your difference. It's a dead-end in many ways, but peace, happiness, joy, bliss - it is all real and they have nothing to do with how others look on you.

> Do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less?

Theres a line to be drawn here and it depends on the functionality of the implant. Implants that restore normal function versus implants that do something else which healthy humans could not achieve without.

Why are you choosing to draw the line there? I don't understand the rationale for that choice.

I took it as humans are incredibly complex things with properties ranging along curves. What happens when one of these properties gets pushed out far beyond the previous maximum of its curve? What happens when people can stay hyperfocused for 12 hours straight? Their IQ's jump 100 points on average? Will they look upon normal people like we look upon cattle (historically, slavery is the normal state of mankind)? When people can turn on and off their modes, will they pick their favorite mode and never turn it off?

Yes, it is certainly useful to differentiate between normal ranged human properties, and those so far exceeding the norms we have zero evidence on what to expect.

If we expect "superhumans" to look at us like cattle, does this reflect the idea that we look at "subhumans" like cattle? Isn't that just projecting our own moral failings onto other people?

(So far the evidence seems to point towards the notion that you can't increase human performance by pushing along a single axis. We are near a local optimum in a massive, multidimensional space. Pushing too much in any one direction will move us farther from the local optimum.)

The counterpoint is that superpowers do not come bundled with superior morality, but the consequences are magnified.

We're facing this everyday with rich and powerful making likely bad choices, for themselves and for others. Why would any other kind of superhuman be different?

The question is only of magnitude - what could one person do? How would they do it? What would be the cost or benefit?

By one definition, the rationale seems reasonably straight forward. We imagine some Platonic ideal human, or perhaps some range. It seems reasonable to say that moving toward that is becoming "more human", away is becoming "less human".

This doesn't directly imply that interventions that make someone "less human" should be avoided.

> It seems reasonable to say that moving toward that is becoming "more human", away is becoming "less human".

That's not a rationale, that's just a criterion. My question is, "What is the rationale for avoiding these types of changes?"

It's a rationale for the belief, which is what I thought you were asking about. It's not a rationale for avoiding the changes, but I don't see that advocated as such in this thread.

> Implants that restore normal function versus implants that do something else which healthy humans could not achieve without.

Where is that limit achieved? In the case of prosthetic limbs, should we seek to achieve perfect organic behavior replicability, or is anything further than that inhuman in some arcane way? Oscar Pistorius, AKA Blade Runner, earned Olympic medals despite having prosthetic legs. Is he advantaged or disadvantaged compared to other participants?

The anime series Texhnolyze touches heavily upon this subject, amongst others.

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