The Digital Civilizations Interviews

Enhancement

The practicalities of enhanced man can be subdivided into two different fields: purely muscular ability, and the cerebral domain. In the first instance, research is centred on the production of exoskeletons capable of increasing strength in an external way. But sacrificing a lot of time and money to the enhancement of pure muscular strenth is not really worthwhile in our post-industrial world, since machines do and soon robots will prove that the human worker can be replaced in most cases. The only possible exception would be sports, where such «enhancements» are, of course, strictly prohibited. The exoskeleton is primarliy a military application, but there are civil projects too, such as those of Japan's Yoshiyuki Sankai, who sees such machines being of assistance to the elderly. The enhancement of the intellectual faculties is just as interesting. It can be internal, involving the use of drugs that aid memory or concentration (choline, modafinil, or Ritalin, for example), or it can be “external”. Books and, more exactly, wired computers, are some methods of improving memory without touching our brains. The field of “enhanced cognition” currently being explored by DARPA consists of coupling the human nervous system with the computer, allowing the user to deal with “information overload” by adapting the machine interface to his or her nervous state. The cyborg is in sight...

Wellbeing

If the idea of enhancement is fundamentally linked to that of productivity, we may also want to transform our bodies for personal development reasons. Here, classic «drugs» will be replaced by more specific products that can act on more precisely trageted areas of the brain, and therefore control mood more easily and accurately. Progress in biology and implant technology could introduce all sorts of fashions: if one considers the popularity of tattoos and piercings, one can only speculate on the bodily modifications of the future. The fields of cosmetic surgery and transsexualism also owe a lot to biological progress. The ideas of morphological and cognitive freedom are linked to this “libertarian” approach to human improvement.

PISTES

• Huge amounts of progress in the neurosciences and synthetic biology in recent years.
• General desire to enjoy better health and increase longevity.
• Interest of major forces (the army).
• Preexisting «body art» culture (tatoos, piercings, etc.).
• «Enhanced characters» are well represented in pop culture and in series for children and adolescents; the idea will not surprise them.
• Ethical reponsibility: citizens' groups draw attention to the risks and dangers of «enhancement» but without condeming it.
• Citizens' groups draw attention to the benefits of enhancement, but without idealizing it (Centre for Cognitive LIberty: www.cognitiveliberty.org)