Peter Thiel’s Enhanced Games promise to be an annual sporting event that lets athletes use performance-enhancing drugs, nicknamed the pro-doping Olympics. The games have captured imaginations and money. But behind them is an unsettling effort spearheaded by tech billionaires like Thiel to use science and technology to enhance the human race.
Their vision sounds alluring: If we can lengthen our lifespans and augment our brains and productivity, we’ll live a life of leisure, powered by robots and funded by universal basic income. But they rarely mention that utopia could come with a price, eroding human agency and perhaps worsening inequality.
Thiel, best known for being an early investor in Facebook, has poured millions of dollars into longevity research and has reportedly signed up for cryonic preservation. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman also plans to preserve his brain upon his death so that his mind can be become one with the hyperintelligent AI systems.
“I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he once said. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos is trying to reverse ageing, while Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have also poured money into immortality research. Elon Musk is trying to enhance human cognition with brain implants through Neuralink.
Christian Angermeyer, a tech investor running Thiel’s Enhanced Games, has written that we should expect several waves of human enhancement, with the first generation marked by mass adoption of weight-loss medications, followed by drugs that can tackle muscle degeneration for older people and enhance cognition.
Psychedelic drugs that can address mental health issues will follow, before what he describes as the final wave: “transhumanism” through brain implants.
This isn’t just the techno-optimist philosophy normally associated with Silicon Valley—that complex biological and social issues are just like engineering problems it is best placed to solve. It’s also a contemporary resurgence of something like transhumanism, the theory that humans can evolve past their physical limits with the help of science and technology.
Technologists who take this idea to its extreme believe that the merger of humans with computers isn’t just possible, but necessary. Musk told his Neuralink scientists to work with a “maniacal sense of urgency” to deploy his brain implants so humans can defend themselves against future rogue AI.
Google’s Page is so enamoured of the idea that computers will one day spawn digital beings that Musk said Page called him a “speciesist” for favouring human life over digital life forms.
The problem with this zeal is that it can lead to ends-justify-the-means thinking, which doesn’t bode well for a philosophy with disconcerting roots. Transhumanism was coined in 1957 by the biologist Julian Huxley, a British advocate of eugenics who saw the idea as a scientific way to improve humans.
He pushed for “positive eugenics,” encouraging “genetically superior” people to reproduce, for instance. While the likes of Thiel, Musk, Page and Altman aren’t advocating eugenics, they’re pursuing similar objectives to transhumanism. Given their influence, that shouldn’t be dismissed as wacky, but scrutinized for the possible repercussions in the long term.
One potential victim is the value of human achievement itself. Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality, has argued that we should resist technological enhancement if we want to maintain an economy where people earn their own way.
“If you structure a society on not emphasizing individual human agency, it’s the same thing operationally as denying people clout, dignity, and self-determination,” he was quoted as saying.
Economic inequality could also worsen in a world where enhanced individuals get an edge in education and job markets—or achieve superior health. Angermeyer is batting away criticism from the International Olympic Committee that he is destroying “any concept of fair play and fair competition in sport.” The panel is right. For all the cheating that does go on in the Olympics, we need a level playing field for sporting contests to be meaningful.
One partner at a venture capital firm summed things up best for me on the sidelines of a tech party: The real benefits of artificial general intelligence (AGI) will come when people with brain implants can become the smartest ones in the room. Technologists, in other words, are eager to get a competitive edge on everyone else.
The techno-optimist view that science and technology can ‘enhance’ human life has long reigned in Silicon Valley, but every innovation has a price and unexpected complexities. The utopia that their enhancement technology will lead to is far from certain. ©boomberg