Will Human Augmentation Be a Hard Sell?

There are basically two arguments against non-medical human augmentation.

- Graham Templeton

One is that it’s too medically dangerous to be ethical. The other is that it will have negative-enough effects on society that even medically safe procedures are unethical. One is a scientific argument in need of a scientific appraisal, while the other is essentially a moral or philosophical argument that should be addressed in a distinct way. The general public doesn’t seem to draw this distinction, muddying up the purely scientific question of safety with the purely personal question of social benefit, and the right (not the ability) of man to muck with nature.

That’s just one of the implications of polling data collected by the Pew Research Center, summarized in a long and involved report titled “U.S. Public Wary of Biomedical Technologies to ‘Enhance’ Human Abilities” published in July of this year. It gets at not just how people feel about the future of biotechnology but also their opinions about specific initiatives and possible futures. The report reveals some intriguing patterns of belief, some pretty reasonable fears, and some pretty ridiculous ones. It focuses most powerfully on gene editing of babies and adults, upgraded synthetic blood, and intracranial brain implants for cognitive enhancement. Each produced distinct worries from the study’s subjects.