"I know it is a weakness of human nature to become emotionally invested in inconsequential tribal spats, but people who want to be transhumanists need to be able to get past that almost as a prerequisite. In fact, a good portion of the transhumanist ideals are all about shedding this behavior."
- J. Andrew Rogers

A new class of drug may increase alertness without any of the jitteriness of over-stimulation, suggest the results of a small clinical trial released this week.

A compound dubbed CX717, a member of the new class called ampakines, significantly improved performance on tests of memory, attention, alertness, reaction time and problem solving in healthy men deprived of sleep.

The study was carried out by Julia Boyle at the Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey, UK, and her colleagues on behalf of Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc., based in Irvine, California, US.

Thanks to laser surgery, Tiger Woods now has better-than-perfect vision. Is it fair play?

Nothing destroys a sporting reputation like steroids. In 1998, Mark McGwire was a baseball hero. Wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan, "If Popeye wants his arms back - he'll have to wait until October", he obliterated the record for the number of home runs in a season. Last month, McGwire was branded a cheat for using a legal, performance-enhancing steroid precursor, androstenedione, when he achieved the feat.

It may seem like a simple case of right and wrong. McGwire used a steroid precursor, albeit one that was legal in baseball, and he has been punished. But the line between right and wrong in sport is being increasingly blurred. It is now possible to enhance performance through surgery and, very soon, gene therapy. Accusations of double standards are in the air.

When McGwire achieved his record, he was also wearing contact lenses. Natural vision is 20/20, but McGwire's lenses improved his vision to 20/10, so he could see, at a distance of 20ft, what a person of normal vision could see at 10ft. Clearly, that could make a difference when you're trying to hit a fast ball. But the hearing, which criticised him for his artificially enhanced muscles, made no mention of his artificially enhanced eyesight.

Thirty years from now, the uproar surrounding Barry Bonds' alleged steroid use might seem quaint by comparison to the human enhancement technologies that could be available then.

In the next few decades, futurists say, athletes and soldiers will call on artificial muscles to lift heavier loads and run faster. Bionic eyes will let them see distant targets, while "nanobots" enhance their cognitive abilities and genetic-engineering techniques boost their performance under pressure.

"The use of anabolic steroids, in retrospect, will seem almost prehistoric — as well as stupid," said Jerome C. Glenn, executive director of the American Council for the United Nations University (Washington) and co-author of the book 2004: State of the Future. "In the future, we'll be able to enhance ourselves in other ways that won't be so dangerous."

Transhumanism—the practice of enhancing people through technology—sounds like science fiction. But when it arrives (and it will), it will create unique problems for CIOs.

This fall, the editors of a leading public policy magazine, Foreign Policy, asked eight prominent intellectuals to identify the single idea they felt was currently posing the greatest threat to humanity. Most of the suggestions were merely old demons: various economic myths, the idea that you can fight "a war on evil," Americaphobia and so on. Only Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, came up with a new candidate: transhumanism.

Transhumanism might be described as the technology of advanced individual enhancement. While it includes physical modifications (diamondoid teeth, self-styling hair, autocleaning ears, nanotube bones, lipid metabolizers, polymer muscles), most of the interest in the technology focuses on the integration of brains and computers—especially brains and networks. Sample transhumanist apps could include cell phone implants (which would allow virtual telepathy), memory backups and augmenters, thought recorders, reflex accelerators, collaborative consciousness (whiteboarding in the brain), and a very long list of thought-controlled actuators. Ultimately, the technology could extend to the uploading and downloading of entire minds in and out of host bodies, providing a self-consciousness that, theoretically, would have no definitive nor necessary end. That is, immortality, of a sort.

While some of these abilities are clearly quite far off, others are already attracting researchers (see "Brain Gain"), and none are known (at the moment at least) to be impossible to achieve. Fukuyama obviously felt the technology was close enough at hand to write a book about it, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, the thrust of which is that society should give the whole idea a miss. His main concern was that transhumanism would place an impossible burden on the idea of equal rights, since it would multiply the number of ways of being human well past our powers of tolerance. (If we have all this trouble with something simple like skin color, just wait until some people have wings, augmented memory and reflex accelerators.)

In mainstream writings on science and society from the seventeenth century to the end of the millennium, the beneficiary of the growth of knowledge was perfectly clear. Humanity as a whole, often referred to as "man," was bound to reap the benefits from the advance of scientific research and its manifold practical applications. Optimistic depictions of progress assumed that eventually the growth of science, technology, and modern institutions would benefit not only the powerful elites, but the world's population more broadly with improvements evident in health, nutrition, housing, industrial production, transportation, education, and numerous other areas.

Among the first to grasp the possibilities were Francis Bacon and René Descartes, whose writings on the promise of the new science included bold projections of the godsend that would flow from the laboratories and workshops. Explaining why it was important to overcome his modesty and publish his discoveries in physics, Descartes comments, "I believed that I could not keep them concealed without sinning grievously against the law by which we are bound to promote...the general good of mankind." It is at last conceivable, he argues, that "we might...render ourselves lords and possessors of nature."

It did not take long, however, for flaws in these hopeful projections to gain the attention of social critics (Karl Marx most prominent among them), who noted that, in practice, the march onward and upward had benefited some groups more than others and left working people in the dust. In later decades, criticisms that were initially focused on divisions of social class were broadened to emphasize varieties of discrimination associated with race, gender, and ethnicity, ones as potent as social class in withholding the boon to "ourselves" that Descartes and others had promised. But even as the scope of criticism enlarged, most thinkers still assumed that the proper beneficiary of progress was humanity as a whole, including populations more diverse than early modernist visions had recognized. To this day, in venues like the Human Development Reports published each year by the United Nations, the dream is alive and well; it remains possible, the U.N. staff insists, to direct the powers of science and technology for the benefit of human beings everywhere, including those who have enjoyed little of the bounty so far.

In recent years the conventional understandings of progress have been challenged yet again, not in this instance by intellectuals concerned about inclusion and social justice, but by entrepreneurs who have discovered a fine new heir to the accumulation of useful knowledge. The writings of several prominent scientists, engineers, and businessmen brashly proclaim that, at the end of the day, the telos of science has nothing to do with serving human needs or alleviating humanity's age-old afflictions. For contemporary developments point to the emergence of a new beneficiary, one vastly modified and improved as compared to its anthropoid ancestors. Yes, human beings may pride themselves in thinking that their presence is required both to generate and enjoy the benefits of scientific advance, but this vain prejudice is false. According to the new prophets of perfectibility, the true inheritor of the legacy of science will be an entirely new creature, one variously named metaman, post-human, superhuman, robot, or cyborg.

Why striving to be more than human is human

"What ideas, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity?" That question was posed to eight prominent policy intellectuals by the editors of Foreign Policy in its September/October issue (not yet available online). One of the eight savants consulted was Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, author of Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. His choice for the world's most dangerous idea? Transhumanism.

In his Foreign Policy article, Fukuyama identifies transhumanism as "a strange liberation movement" that wants "nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints." Sounds ominous, no? But wait a minute, isn't human history (and prehistory) all about liberating more and more people from their biological constraints? After all, it's not as though most of us still live in our species' "natural state" as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers.

Human liberation from our biological constraints began when an ancestor first sharpened a stick and used it to kill an animal for food. Further liberation from biological constraints followed with fire, the wheel, domesticating animals, agriculture, metallurgy, city building, textiles, information storage by means of writing, the internal combustion engine, electric power generation, antibiotics, vaccines, transplants, and contraception. In a sense, the goal toward which humanity has been striving for millennia has been to liberate ourselves from more and more of our ancestors' biological constraints.

For a glimpse of what post-human athletes may look like beginning in the 2012 or 2016 Olympics, take a look at an obscure breed of cattle called the Belgian Blue.

Belgian Blues are unlike any cows you've ever seen. They have a genetic mutation that means they do not have effective myostatin, a substance that curbs muscle growth. A result is that Belgian Blues are all bulging muscles without a spot of fat, like bovine caricatures of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The scientists and engineers spearheading the creation of artificial beings and bionic people are responding to the magnetism of the technological imperative, the pull of a scientific problem as challenging as any imaginable.

Fascinating scientific puzzle though it is, the creation of artificial beings is also expected to meet important needs for society and individuals. Industrial robots are already widely used in factories and on assembly lines. Robots for hazardous duty, from dealing with terrorist threats to exploring hostile environments, including distant planets, are in place or on the drawing boards. Such duty could include military postings because there is a longstanding interest in self-guided battlefield mechanisms that reduce the exposure of human soldiers, and in artificially enhanced soldiers with increased combat effectiveness. (For this reason, the Department of Defense, largely through its research arm — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — is the main U.S. funding source for research in artificial creatures.) Artificial creatures can also be used in less hostile environments: homes, classrooms, and hospitals and rest homes, serving as all-purpose household servants, helping to teach, and caring for the ill or elderly.

Among these possibilities, the connection between artificial creatures and human implants might be the most important because it promises enormous medical benefits. This connection might be the single greatest motivation to develop artificial beings. Yet regardless of their potential good uses, and apart from any issues of blasphemy, we have concerns about robots and androids. One fear is that the limitations we think to design out of our creations, from cosmetic deficiencies to the existential realities of illness and death, are essential human attributes, and that to abandon them is somehow to abandon our humanity. Something in us, it seems, fears perfection, and artificial beings threaten us with an unwelcome perfection, expressed as rigid unfeeling precision.

There is another menace first conveyed nearly 200 years ago in “Frankenstein,” and now more compelling than ever: the fear that technology will grow out of control and diminish humanity for all of us. That concern is hardly limited to artificial creatures. It appears in many arenas — the loss of privacy associated with new forms of surveillance and data manipulation; the depersonalization of human relationships; the incidence of human-made ecological disaster; the growing gap between the world’s technological “haves” and “have-nots.” It is especially and deeply unsettling, however, to contemplate the literal displacement of humanity by beings made in the human image, only better.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a worried man. He's worried about the future of humanity. More particularly, he's worried about how, in this brave new world, we are to continue to think of ourselves as human. Fernández-Armesto is a distinguished and prolific British (despite the name) historian; while some of us are watching reruns of The Simpsons, he's beavering away on such ambitious mega-topics as Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years and Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature. He has said that he likes to alternate the tomes with smaller-scale volumes, but still with such dizzyingly large topics as Truth and the new Humankind: A Brief History (Oxford, 190 pages). This is a deceptive book, with implications that are disturbing, if stimulating. It is not a history of humanity, but one of how we have over the centuries conceived of being human.

Fernández-Armesto begins by posing a question that would, until at least the Victorians, have been unthinkable: What does it mean to be human? He asks this because he finds, in an age during which "we have invested an enormous amount of thought, treasure, and blood in what we call human values, human rights, the defence of human dignity and of human life," an imperilling series of challenges from science and philosophy to the whole idea of "humanhood."

Though bioethicists have their doubts, Justice de Thézier and his fellow transhumanists want to build a supertechnological you.

At a public square on the Lower Main a belligerent drunk in an electric wheelchair shouts obscenities at a police officer whose attempts to grab him are befuddled by the man's oversized vehicle. The cop, befuddled by the prospects of getting the drunk into the paddy wagon, awkwardly tries to grab the man again. Eventually the cop gives up and drives off.

The disabled man in the big wheeled machine has transformed disability into his advantage - the technology has turned him from a cripple to a space pod commander invulnerable to arrest. Body technology had kept the well-oiled man-machine from the backseat of the cop van.

It's a suitable image just prior to a meeting with Justice de Thézier, the local leader of Montreal's transhumanist movement, a recently formed gang of about 15 hardcore techno-utopians who seek to lobby and curry public enthusiasm for the improvements that technology can have for the human condition.

I was keeping a contacted-lensed eye out for a futuristic übermensch clad in exoskeletal scaffolding with a wearable computer and an integrated Webcam. But the chief local enthusiast of cyborgs and the gatekeeper of the cryptadia of the full-throttle human tech agenda comes equipped only with a cool name - Justice de Thézier, apparently his real moniker, and his physical form looked more metrosexual than technofutural.

Humanity is on its way out. Post-humanity--technologically enhanced and perhaps even immortal--is coming.

The stuff of science fiction is creed to transhumanists, a diverse group of technological optimists who advocate the transformation of Homo sapiens into a new species, one "better than human."

Transhumanists see our era of rapid technological advance as the transitional phase between our human past and post-human future. Cochlear implants, artificial joints, genetic engineering, mood-altering and memory-enhancing drugs--all are preludes to an era when people will routinely enhance their brains, improve their bodies and perhaps live forever.

Critics, however, think this could be the worst calamity to befall us, both as individuals and as a species. And they argue we should be taking steps to prevent it.

All this week at Next News, I've been writing and chatting about the topic of human enhancement, also the subject of an article in this week's issue of the magazine. Today, a few thoughts on extending the human life span and genetic engineering from William Hurlbut, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and a consulting professor in the Program in Human Biology at Stanford University.

Next News: So what's wrong with doubling–or more–the human life span?

Suppose you were offered a photographic memory, perfect pitch, ultraviolet-spectrum vision, heightened disease resistance, customized skin and eye color, and a one-thousand-year life-expectancy. Would you accept? Now suppose you were told that by doing so you would cease to be human. Would this make you less willing to accept? If you’re like me, you’ll answer “Yes” to the first question and “No” to the second. I could stand the improvements, and if they make me more than “human,” so what? If you answer “Yes” to the first question but say that leaving humanness behind would actually make you more willing to accept, you may be a “transhumanist,” the new breed of perfectionists who aim at collective self-improvement through direct modification of “human nature.”

According to Nick Bostrom, a young philosopher at Oxford and a leading transhumanist:

Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become post-human, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.1

Whereas humanists for centuries have settled for trying to perfect humanity, transhumanists want to transcend it. “Transhumanism has roots in secular humanist thinking, yet is more radical in that it promotes not only traditional means of improving human nature, such as education and cultural refinement, but also direct application of medicine and technology to overcome some of our basic biological limits.”