[extropy-chat] LA Times: Will human enhancement make us better?

[Jef Allbright]

In today's LA Times:

Excerpts:

    "Speaking last week in a television interview, Kurzweil defined
    humanity as "the species that goes beyond our limitations." Of
    course, in that quest we are also the species that has come close to
    immolating the planet (during the Cold War), destroying our
    environment and ruining baseball."

    "But if we are to believe scientists and technologists, nothing but
    good can come from human-performance enhancement. As a 2002 report
    of the normally staid National Science Foundation proclaimed, the
    21st century "could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and
    evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment," all
    through research on human-performance enhancement."

    "I participated in some of the meetings that led to that report.
    Most of the attendees were highly intelligent white males who worked
    in the semiconductor industry, at national weapons laboratories or
    major research universities. At one point, the group got to talking
    about how we might soon achieve brain-to-brain interfaces that would
    eliminate misunderstandings among humans. Instead of having to rely
    on imperfect words, we would be able to directly signal our thoughts
    with perfect precision."

    "I asked how such enhanced abilities would get around differing
    values and interests. For instance, how would more direct
    communication of thought help Israelis and Palestinians better
    understand one another? Unable to use the ambiguities and subtleties
    of language to soften the impact of one's raw convictions, might
    conflict actually be amplified? A person at one of the meetings
    acknowledged he "hadn't thought about values," while another
    suggested that I was being overly negative. What seemed clear was
    that the group's homogeneity made it impossible for it to scrutinize
    the assumptions beneath its rosy vision of "performance enhancement.""

Entire article is at
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-sarewitz9aug09,1,1735412.story 
<http://www.jefallbright.net/node/>

- Jef