Transhumanism

io9 asks: "Where do you stand on the subject of human enhancement?" By this they mean do you believe it is ethical to give someone a brain implant that gives them direct access to wikipedia, as an arbitrary example.

Such a question is on par with asking "where do you stand on the subject of smartphones?" And by that I mean "smartphones are here, your opinion is irrelevant to the inundation of culture with the technology. It's here, its not going anywhere. The penetration of (insert technology here) will only increase.

Because lets be honest with ourselves. Human enhancement went from zero to hero with the advent of wireless internet access. Honestly wireless transfer of data will be looked back on as the greatest innovation of the 20th Century, of that I have no doubt. The internet was great, it connected us all, contained an exponentially growing volume of human knowledge, but really when we could carry it in our pocket - anywhere - is when it really unleashed its potential. I can know almost anything, almost anywhere, with a few clicks on my phone. For 30 bucks a month. "You can't get everything on the internet," you argue. Well actually I just asked my Wolfram Alpha app and it told me that in fact, I can get 98% of everything ever on my phone. So there.

The point is human augmentation isn't a moment, its a process. And the process is so completely amongst us already arguing it as a standalone concept isn't really germane, at least not anymore. If we want to discuss ethics and human augmentation, we need to talk about the ethics of keeping it capitalistic. Because obviously the rich kids will get the cool implants first. And its a pretty slippery slope between that and having Double Plus Alphas and Epsilon Minuses, based on how much money your parents had when you are born.
Of course this quickly digresses into a sci-fi novel, right? But we live in the sci-fi novel our parents read, and not even Wells could imagine a smartphone.

In any case, I built myself a 2 milliamp transcranial direct current stimulator that runs a sub-lethal applied current across my prefrontal cortex and out my primary motor cortex. Sometimes I use it at work, and if literature is right then its responsible for the incredible rate of speed at which I am learning to code in Objective-C. When I get the implantable version done I'll let you know. It'll be restrictively expensive, but then again, all cool new gadgets should be.


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