Bookplanet: high-tech humans

More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement
by Ramez Naam
Review by Lisa Bellantoni

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.

(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)