The sports pages are reporting that Major League Baseball does a lousy job monitoring its players for performance enhancing drugs. But talk about a futile effort to hold back the march of reality. We have a friend who teaches in law school on questions of law, culture, and emerging technologies. He asks his students how many of them "have close friends or associates" who are taking prescription pills to enhance their cognitive performance. For several years now, more than half of the students have raised their hands—and they have been willing to tell our friend where he can get them. (He hasn't told us yet—really.)
The fact is, you have a lot more in common with Barry Bonds than you think. Like it or not, you are the proud owner of the latest, new-and-improved-model human brain and body, a version that has only recently become available and that renders all previous models obsolete. Do you think your brain is the same as that of a hunter-gatherer of your species who lived 10,000 years ago? What does it mean that in ancient, oral societies human memory was a principal indicator of intelligence, but we now have search engines that give anyone with a computer access to the world's accumulated memory? Put somewhat differently: You are smarter than Homer. This is because, unlike Homer, you're part of a cognitive network that includes books, search engines, social networks with other smart brains on it, and the like. How do you think you compare to a thirteenth-century peasant, or to Queen Victoria? Queen Victoria could not have even imagined your iPod, and she would have been baffled and probably appalled by what you call music; nor could she have imagined the world's capacity to wipe out smallpox, to control typhus and cholera in European and American cities, or to annihilate itself through an arsenal of 20,000 or so nuclear weapons.
To mention just a few of the standard features of your enhanced brain and body, you now come equipped with a fully re-engineered immune system, an up-to-date capacity to distinguish fact from fiction, a completely revised set of cultural assumptions about gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, and, for those of you under thirty, or addicted to i-Phones, a special condensed-language module for instant messaging-all in your own brain and body. Perhaps even more impressive is the amazing range of customized enhancements that some of you have chosen to add to your standard equipment package, including ceramic alloy joints, neurochemical mood modulators, and hormone performance boosters. And if you're cramming for an exam, you may well have just absorbed some psychopharma to enhance your concentration and cognitive function . . . maybe coffee, maybe something more potent and less sanctioned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
You are, in other words, part of a technology-induced evolutionary program that has been going on more or less since the origins of humankind—a program that distinguishes and defines humankind, a program of continuing expansion of the human desire to understand, modify, and control its surroundings, its prospects, and its self, and to couple to the technologies that surround us ever more intimately. From the pre-dawn of civilization, when human tool-making and meat-eating were co-evolving with brain development into the version 1.0 enhanced Homo sapiens model almost 200,000 years ago, through the rise of agriculture and the development of early cities with their new capacities for networked human action, through the harnessing of horse power and wind power and water power and the organization of mercantile activities with an intercontinental reach, through the proliferation of the printed word and literacy, and above all through the constant race to develop new ways to exercise military might and kill one's adversaries-in all this business of enhancing the reach and the constitution of our brains and bodies, you are the latest and most advanced iteration. This is the Techno-Human Condition, and there is no escape.
