“Cognitive Enhancement Devices Are Just The Tip Of The Iceberg”

May 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cognitive enhancement, through electric stimulation or drugs or genetic manipulation, is certainly our future. While it’s a serious business, some of the early efforts have come dressed in leisure clothes: Gamers are using brain-stimulation devices to give them an edge. Ethicist Hannah Maslen of the Conversation thinks regulation should start with these early adopters, even if their high scores are essentially meaningless. An excerpt:

“Our recommendations are not at all motivated by a belief that access to cognitive enhancement devices should be restricted in general. Instead, we think that consumer freedom is optimised when the products that people buy in fact do what the manufacturers claim they do, and when people have the information they need to properly assess which risks they are willing to take.

For my colleague Julian Savulescu, cognitive enhancement devices are just the tip of the iceberg. We will start to see more and more technologies that are aimed at enhancing human performance so we need to strike the right balance now. If we fall prey to scaremongering, we run the risk of over regulating but public safety is vital. The key is to inform the public properly about these devices so they can live their lives as they choose, taking reasonable risks if they want to.

The best option would be to filter the most dangerous enhancement devices out of the market. No one wants to use a device that will definitely cause them great harm and this is especially true if there are ways to make the same or similar device safer. This would also leave individuals free to choose which small-to-moderate risks they want to take in pursuit of enhanced cognitive capacities, whether that be for learning languages, mastering maths or eliminating the enemy in Call of Duty.”

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