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- [00:00]
Moderator
Welcome, everybody to the LSE and to the Forum for European Philosophy. Tonight is an event that is part of the Forum's dialogue series in which we invite two thinkers to come to us and join us in discussing an important issue, an important idea, a problem.
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Ann Kerr
A big question, as it were.
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Moderator
And tonight's topic is human enhancement, where enhancement refers to the possibility of. Of improving the state of an organism beyond its normal healthy state. So enhancement in that sense is different, prima facie at least, different from therapy, where you aim to somehow compensate for a deficit or something that has gone wrong.
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Ann Kerr
Right.
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Moderator
Though, as we would perhaps see in the discussion, it might not always be so easy to actually draw that line. Now, we actually all engage already in enhancement in some form or another. So quite a few of us, including myself, wear glasses. Most of us will probably drink coffee in the morning. We perhaps do exercise, we meditate, all kinds of things to improve somehow our status in our organism. But it seems that due to the advances of technology and neuroscience and other sciences, new forms of enhancement are being developed, are already in existence today, but also might in the future be developed. And these new forms of enhancement might somehow alter the organism, perhaps in new and interesting and particularly challenging ways, in raising particularly interesting ethical questions. Right, so think of brain computer interfaces, think of genetic engineering, think of new drugs to enhance memory, for example, or to remove the need for sleep. Or think of brain implants, all kinds of things like that.
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Ann Kerr
Right?
- [02:00]
Moderator
So these new technologies might have the potential to alter the human cognition in fundamental ways and hence raise fundamental ethical questions. And the aim of today's dialogue is to explore some of these questions. So what we want to do is we want to consider the various possibilities, potential scenarios for human enhancement and the potential risks and benefits associated with these. And tonight, here to do that with us are two very distinguished speakers who are very qualified to help us engage with these issues. So we have Nick Bostrom, who is professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and of the Program on the Impacts of Future Technology within the Oxford Martin School. He actually has a PhD in Philosophy of Science from the LSE as well. So he's returning today to us to talk to us about these things. And his wide ranging work is focused on a lot of big issues, very much in line with the kind of things that the forum is interested in, including, of course, human enhancement. And he has written quite a bit of. He has done quite a lot of work on those issues, as well as on other issues. And then there's Ann Kehr, who is professor of sociology at the University of Leeds. Her work focuses on science and technology studies and the sociology of health and illness, and she has a particular focus on gender, genetics, reproduction. The way we want to do this is I'll first ask the two speakers to briefly present their a basic outline of their views on the topic. Then I'll basically hand over to them to engage in a little debate between the two of them. I might ask some questions myself and then we'll open up the debate to the floor and take questions from you. And before we start, one final thing that I was asked to say. Speaking of future technologies and present technologies and so on, for those of you who want to tweet along the event, there's a Twitter hashtag that you should use if you do that, and the hashtag is lsenhance. You can see that there as well. Okay. So feel free to tweet along during or after the event. And with that I'll just hand over to you. I think Nick will start with giving us a few thoughts on the issue.
- [04:29]
Nick Bostrom
Okay. Thank you very much for inviting me here. This is a big topic. So rather than trying to cover all the basis of this in my introductory remarks, I'll just pick up one or two small things and then we can fill things in as we go along. I think there are two different kinds of perspective one could adopt when trying to evaluate the desirability of different forms of human enhancement. On the one hand, we have what we might call a narrow view or the conventional view, where you evaluate it by the same standards as you would evaluate any other proposals for things we might do, policy proposals, and so forth. On the other hand, you have a kind of a wider view, the view that you would adopt if you actually were an altruist who wanted to do what is possible best for the world, taking long term consequences into account. That's a view that's rarely adopted when you're actually doing policy. But it's interesting, at least from my perspective, as somebody with an interest in moral philosophy. So we might kind of jump a little bit back and forth between these two different evaluative perspectives, but it's useful to keep them apart. I think that the main problem with human enhancement today is that it doesn't work. That is that the methods and techniques available currently are very weak. They have marginal efficacy in some particular situations. They do enhance performance, particularly in sport where anabolic steroids help build muscle or erythropoietin can help cyclists go a little faster. But for the most part, they are of, I think, marginal effectiveness and their long term consequences are often unknown. So there's at least one good reason for being a little bit cautious about embracing biomedical enhancement in its current form, which is just kind of the boring but important fact that they are medically dubious. Now. It's interesting, however, to consider some time into the future when presumably there will be increasingly effective ways of intervening in human nature available. And there are many different avenues of research that are currently pointing in that direction. So for some purposes, it can be useful to abstract from the current technological limitations and then consider the political and ethical questions that arise when we get more effective tools. And my view on that is that you have to evaluate these on a case by case basis, that there are big differences between different kinds of enhancement. And just to pick out one distinction that is relevant here, and then I'll sort of. Maybe we can get into the details more later. Is that the distinction between positional and absolute goods. So in economics, a positional good is some good that you have, but only by virtue of somebody else lacking the same good. For example, in the enhancement context, maybe height is something that gives you various advantages if you are a male. In our society, being taller is associated with higher status, like maybe greater mating success and so forth. But if all males were three inches taller, then nobody would be any better off than before, because one person's gain is cancelled out by a lot of other people's corresponding losses, like they are kind of shorter by comparison. So this is a big dividing line that you can draw through the line of possible enhancements. And insofar as an enhancement would provide only a positional advantage, I think there is no moral case for promoting it. So this would apply to, say, increases in height. It would apply to cosmetic enhancements. You know, if everybody had perfectly white and straight teeth, then somebody had slightly normal teeth by current standards would suddenly seem defective. So again, it just shifts the bar. And we can contrast this with enhancements that give some intrinsic benefit to the user independently of whether other people also have the same enhancement. For instance, an enhancement of your health if you are healthy, if you are immune to getting an infectious disease or you can't get cancer, say, that's good for you, even if everybody else also have the same enhancement. So in those cases, I think that the moral case for enhancement is much stronger. Now, most, or at least many enhancements would be a mixture of these two kinds of goods. That would involve a positional element, but also an intrinsic element, say intelligence enhancement would have A positional component in as much as if you are smarter, you can compete more effectively for the best grades and the best jobs. And that's a positional aspect, but it also has this intrinsic aspect. There are other reasons for valuing cognitive capacity other than being able to get good grades. You want to be able to understand great literature. You want to be able to contribute to projects that understand the political system and so forth. So I guess to simplify, my view would be that if the advantages are purely positional, then there is no moral reason for doing it. But if there is at least some component that is also intrinsic, then there is at least a prima facie case for thinking that it might be desirable to pursue.
- [10:09]
Moderator
Okay, thank you. Do you just want to go straight ahead?
- [10:13]
Ann Kerr
Sure. Okay, thank you. I suppose I'm coming at this from a slightly different direction because I'm a sociologist. So I'm interested in how ideas and technologies of human enhancement have developed. What sort of actors have been involved in developing and promoting those ideas. What happens when they're taken up in practice? Can we learn from other similar kinds of technologies, looking back at what's happened with them, to understand what would happen with the kinds of technologies that Nick is talking about? And can we think about the social implications of those developments beyond the individual and their immediate circumstances? So I think I have several observations that I'd want to open the discussion with from that kind of perspective. The first is, and I think probably Nick would agree with this, that the idea that you can make a nice clean division between enhancement and intervention to treat disease is problematic because many of these things are actually integrated and mixed up practice. And in actual fact, one of the ideas about enhancement or the promotion of the idea of thinking about human enhancement came around about the time when gene therapy was being developed. And a distinction was drawn between gene therapy for the treatment of disease and human enhancement to make people better than normal. So that was a kind of rhetorical device that was used at the time amongst the communities of scientists and policy makers who are promoting a certain kind of genetic therapy. So I think that means that we've always got to be aware of what the normal is when we're talking about enhancement, and to be aware that that shifts. And Nick has already suggested that himself that that's a problematic thing. You know, you raise the bar if everybody has white teeth, then there's another issue about the presentation of one's mouth. That becomes a way of seeking advantage in society. And that's how things progress. And indeed, if you look at Technologies that are probably similar, we can think about as similar to the kinds of human enhancement technologies that we're talking about here. If you look at how they've developed and been taken up, what tends to happen is that they are initially presented as a means of improving the law of a distinct small group of people, but that then that expands gradually and gradually and gradually, so more and more people are encouraged to take up these technologies. So Ritalin is a good example of that, initially targeted at people with adhd. And the definition of ADHD expands, so more and more people get captured in this definition. And then Ritalin starts to be used more widely for enhancement of concentration. So I think that's a problematic feature of these technologies that we need to bear in mind. And more generally, I think that we need to recognize that we're living in a consumer capitalist economy and the way in which these technologies will develop and be distributed are probably along consumer lines. And that makes me question what sort of advantage they bring to society as a whole. Because just the very fact that people who have the financial means to go and purchase these technologies and will therefore go and do it, will mean that there are going to be an excluded group of people who are not able to consume and it's not going to make their life better. In fact, it's probably going to to make their life more miserable. And if we go down a line of saying, well actually we should engineer this on a wider scale through public policy and a kind of social engineering, that makes me very concerned as well, because that smacks of a kind of positive eugenics. And we have a very bad history of that in this country as well as in other Western countries and beyond. So efforts to try and engineer the population to be better. For example, one could imagine arguing that children in disadvantaged communities, perhaps they should be all given enhancers at school to improve their concentration, or girls from families where there are social problems should all be given contraceptives at the age of 13, implants could be distributed and that there would be an argument that this might benefit them and indeed their communities. But the knock on effects of that, the unintended consequences, the side effects I think are hugely problematic. So for all of those reasons, I think I would be very wary about promoting human enhancement technologies. And ultimately I think that it's somewhat of a distraction really when you think about the massive challenges that societies face, the huge levels of inequality and the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the wealthy, I think these are the things that we ought to be concerning ourselves with as social Scientists and philosophers rather than human enhancement technologies.
- [15:37]
Moderator
Okay, interesting. So basically, if people may be even shifting the focus, do you want to.
- [15:44]
Nick Bostrom
I could pick up on some things. I mean, there's, I think a lot of the reasons you put forward would apply equally. Instead of considering a biomedical enhancement pill, we considered laptops, say, which also is a technology that can give somebody advantages, which is expensive at first and therefore first used by elite groups or wealthy groups and in a sense increases their advantage over others. And it's not clear how any of the things you said would not apply to that case. So it seems that the arguments risk proving too much. They risk, if they actually worked, would also suggest that we should cut back on all kind of just ordinary technologies.
- [16:29]
Ann Kerr
Well, I think there's distinctions between these kinds of things. I mean, first of all, a biomedical response is something that's done to the body, in the body of the body, as opposed to, you know, purchasing a laptop. So I think, you know, there's concerns there about what happens to bodies as well as what happens to societies beyond that. But nobody is advocating a kind of program of digital enhancement in the same way that human enhancements are being advocated. And I think that that's why response is, is to question and problematize and think that that's quite reasonable.
- [17:12]
Nick Bostrom
I think there are some people who are promoting different kinds of, you know, availability of digital technologies and promoting the rollout of bandwidth. Many countries have had big programs for that. And I mean even within the healthcare system there are sort of techniques that are developed that are usually expensive at first. And most people on earth cannot afford to have like a kidney transplant or anything like that or a cancer drug. And yet so in a sense, when there's a new cancer drug being developed, it increases global inequality and as much as the better off or even better off because now they can also buy this treatment for their diseases. But it would be very hard egalitarian line to think that that's a reason to try to forego these expensive luxury treatments.
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Ann Kerr
Well, it probably is a reason to think about the way in which the pharmaceutical industry operates and indeed the way in which the digital industries operate. And to think about what as a society we want to promote in terms of the activities. And of course one can't intervene in markets very easily and it takes a lot of activity amongst broad ranges of people, but it does, it's still possible to challenge those markets and to understand that those markets are pernicious and there ought to be alternative solutions and to think about, I mean, I suppose I Should ask you really, how much of the enhancements that you advocate do you see as a kind of the need to be social engineering or public policy interventions, or do you feel the need to leave it to the market?
- [19:01]
Nick Bostrom
Well, I think that there is a range of options there, which, depending on people's political views, they will choose one or the other. But to some extent, that's an orthogonal and independent question, like to the question of whether or not we should promote enhancement. So you might favor more or less redistribution or more or less public services versus the private sector. And there's like an old debate, and people have a big tug of war sort of pulling in both directions there. So I don't think we're going to resolve that debate here. But wherever you sit on that line, I think you could find some way to see a role for these kind of biomedical enhancements within your favorite social framework. So if you were, say, thinking that it was important to try to reduce social inequalities, then you could imagine subsidizing some of these things. For example, there's also a premise here which is questionable and perhaps false, which is that biomedical enhancements are essentially expensive. If we compare different ways of achieving the same end, say, improved understanding of the world or improved cognitive capacity and able ability to reason. One way we try to achieve that now is through education. And it's important enough that we think we should subsidize education so all kids can have access to that. And it's hugely expensive. Like good quality education costs a lot. Contrast that with, say, a cognitive enhancement pill, like the closest we have today may be Modafinil, which is. Is a pill initially developed to treat narcolepsy, but it seems to also improve working memory, at least in the short run. So that costs some, but it costs less than, say, a cafe latte a day for a daily dose of Modafinil. So if you wanted to improve the cognitive functioning of people, then either you could invest in more better schools that everybody could access to, and that would cost a lot more than if you developed something like Modafinil, but, you know, maybe with slightly fewer side effects. So the very premise there, that these are more exclusive by their nature than sort of social interventions, I think is incorrect.
- [21:13]
Ann Kerr
So can we just talk through an example of how this would work on the cognitive enhancement case? So, for example, the case of children in a deprived area, whether it would be socially useful and beneficial to them as individuals to dish out cognitive enhancers rather than fruit at the lunch break, hopefully both, maybe. Well, presumably There are finite resources, so choices would have to be made about. But yeah, okay, so for example, with the fruit, then would you think that would be okay?
- [21:52]
Nick Bostrom
Well, I think that if they're. To the extent that there are enhancers that actually work now, my favorite, my sort of general tendency would be to be wary of attempts to impose a uniform standard on everybody with regards to enhancement technologies. I think within certain limits it's probably better to leave these choices to individuals. Precisely. I mean, partly because of the, sorry, track record of kind of state engineered attempts to improve the population. Now I think that's consistent with say, having some kind of public information campaign or subsidizing some of these interventions. And I mean, that could be done through the healthcare system. So just as kids can get Ritalin for free on the NHS today, if they really have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or if they can convince the doctor that it would improve them in some way. So if there were other enhancers, I think that that could be made available on the same model. I think right now, actually, paradoxically, it's not the price that causes this barrier or that makes it hard for some people to have access because the price is low for a lot of these things. It's actually the fact that they are not distributed in the normal medical model. That sort of. The medical model is really based on the concept of disease. So that means that if you want to have access to say, modafilinibaritalin today, what you have to do is either you have to be savvy enough to be able to go online and some online pharmacy, which you then need to distinguish from all the fake pharmacies and you have to have a certain sort of amount of social capital and skill to do that, or you have to able to persuade some doctor. And again, that's something that some people with greater social capital will be better able to do. So I think what precludes disadvantaged group from having access today is actually this kind of discrimination between enhancement uses from therapeutic uses. And that's something one could change if one were more embracing of enhancement as a legitimate purpose of medicine.
- [24:05]
Ann Kerr
So let me see if I can just extend that slightly. Probably what that would mean then would be that if these drugs were more widely available to people and it was on the basis of individual choice, that it wouldn't necessarily be children most in need of them who would have them, it would be the children of the middle classes who would have them. And then does that not possibly mean that within the classroom that the distinction between the kids who are naughty and don't concentrate. And those who are well behaved and do concentrate and do well would increase and that actually overall the class wouldn't benefit.
- [24:50]
Nick Bostrom
I don't think it would necessarily do that. The people who would benefit most from say if we take the particular case of enhancements of concentration, the children who would benefit most from that are the ones worst at concentrating. Naturally people just vary. Some can focus for hours and others can't. And the ones who would stand to gain most would be the ones currently at the bottom of that distribution. And I think many enhancers would tend to have this property that it. Because it's often easier, like just from a technological point of view to fix something that is broken than to improve something that is already functioning optimally. So I think in many cases you would find that it's easier to develop an enhancer that works for lifting up the least advantage on a particular kind of trait parameter than it is to, to raise the ones that are already near the top.
- [25:50]
Ann Kerr
But I suppose what I'm trying to get at really is that the children who are in that position who don't concentrate well are probably children from homes where they haven't got the material and financial resources to purchase these drug treatments.
- [26:06]
Nick Bostrom
Well, I mean, in this scenario that we're discussing, they would be available for free on the nhs and even if they were not, they would probably be cheaper than other things they currently could try to do to, to help their children. Like hiring a private tutor or whatever the sort of existing alternatives would be.
- [26:21]
Ann Kerr
Yeah, I think that hiring private tutor is interesting because that's obviously a financial resource that certain people have to improve their kids grades at school. And I think probably my sense is just to close off this example is that probably what would happen would be that what it would mean to get a good grade would increase so that the bar would raise. So just as we see with sports and the use of enhancers in sports, it makes it more difficult for children who are from homes without material resource to access and to become good sportsmen and women. And these kind of technologies would probably have the same kind of effect. So overall I don't see that that is socially beneficial or worse the effort. It would probably make quite a lot of money for pharmaceutical companies, but I don't think that that's a good enough reason to promote it.
- [27:19]
Nick Bostrom
I mean, that's the same. Like if a good university like the LSE or Oxford improves, then all the other universities are worse by comparison. But it's hardly reason for us to cease trying to be better in our classrooms? Is it? I mean, because it does increase the.
- [27:34]
Ann Kerr
Gap of human happiness?
- [27:36]
Nick Bostrom
Well, I mean, this is again the distinction between a positional and absolute advantage. So I think education, like intelligence, mixes both. A large function of education is this accreditation where you get a degree, and that there can only be so many degrees of the highest order, because part of the function of the degree is to differentiate ability. But insofar as education were only about that, then I think that would then maybe remove any reason for public subsidy for education. But we think education also serves some other purposes. For example, actually to acquire knowledge. And to the extent that it's about learning new skills, then just because somebody learns more skills better doesn't mean somebody else cannot also benefit from learning skills. So it's not a zero sum game in that respect.
- [28:24]
Moderator
I want to just pick up on that point in particular because it seems to me that some people feel perhaps a little, little bit uneasy about these, let's say, unconventional ways of enhancing, like taking a memory enhancing drug or taking a concentration enhancing drug, rather than engaging in the more conventional ways of increasing your concentration just by, you know, by practicing a lot and working, working harder and studying and so on. Because they feel that there's an intrinsic value also to just the process of engaging in studying, for instance, or in trying to give folks.
- [29:03]
Nick Bostrom
Some students might have a different view on that.
- [29:06]
Moderator
I mean, I'm not saying that I necessarily, that's necessarily my position, but I just want to put it out there because it seems to me that some people do have that position, that by taking, taking a drug to achieve the same effect, you're actually removing part of what's intrinsically good about education or study or, you know, engaging in sport, namely this kind of pushing yourself to the.
- [29:27]
Ann Kerr
Limits by the means that you have available.
- [29:30]
Nick Bostrom
I think you could still push yourself with the pill. Presumably it's still going to make a difference how hard you work. That's what we see in sport. It doesn't mean that you don't have to train. It just means that kind of the standard of performance increases.
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Moderator
So why is it then that people feel so uneasy about doping in sport, for instance? Or some people would certainly feel uneasy about sport students taking certain drugs before sitting in exam.
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Nick Bostrom
Well, I think in sport it's because it's cheating. And because even if it were made legal in sport so it wouldn't be cheating anymore, it would still only provide a positional benefit. There's going to be one gold medalist no matter what. And we don't really care about the absolute times or weights that the athletes manage. It's really about who wins. And so to the extent that it's about to wins, we're not changing that by having them take drugs.
- [30:19]
Moderator
It's not about who wins though, is it? I mean, it's also about who.
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Ann Kerr
I don't know.
- [30:24]
Nick Bostrom
Well, I think that's my hypothesis for why we would be uneasy about it in sport. Primarily because it's unfair. If not everybody takes it, then it kind of distorts the level playing field idea. And so you could counter that by saying, well, what if we made it legal to take them? Then it would no longer be cheating. I mean, I think the reason there is that it has. Has medical negative effects. And if all it does is to make everybody run a little faster, it doesn't change sort of the amount of good we get from the sport because it's this positional good. So that's why I think maybe in the realm of sport, it makes sense to be wary of the idea of enhancement.
- [31:04]
Ann Kerr
See, I would say in the case of sport that it's already quite difficult for kids to participate in sport. As we know, the Olympics led to quite a lot of reflection on that, about the closing down of playing fields and so forth, and the difficulties for athletes of getting sponsorship and so forth. So it's already quite difficult. And if you have to then purchase a load of pills and take more interventions to achieve that, then it makes it more difficult. And I think that's my concern as well about the enhancements more generally. It's actually about more and more things that we need to buy and purchase and consume to make us better. And it just gets a bit wearisome, really. I'm not kind of suggesting that I'm appealing to some sort of authentic, unadulterated version of human nature or the biological body. That's not the case at all. All. It's just that this all seems to me to be about yet more things that we need to do to participate in this world of consumption.
- [32:12]
Moderator
So you'd think that if you made certain cognitive enhancements or physical enhancements available, then that would sort of create almost an obligation to them also.
- [32:23]
Ann Kerr
Well, yeah, and I think that the use of other kinds of technologies. We haven't talked at all about reproduction and reproductive technologies, but that's quite clear. If you look at how reproductive technologies have been introduced, they start off being presented as a choice, but that choice comes with obligations. And people end up taking up these technologies with all of the problems and benefits that that brings. So I think that choices are never choice, just a matter of pure individual choice. They always bring. They come with obligations dependent on the social arrangements in which people operate.
- [33:04]
Nick Bostrom
Yeah, I mean, again, I think the same things could be said about a lot of other consumer goods more generally. So, I mean, it then brings into maybe play this wider perspective that I mentioned. I'm saying normally when we're making policy, we don't say we shouldn't build any more computers and laptops because it just feeds into our modern consumerist culture and everybody feels they're on a treadmill and we should go back to a simple lifestyle. That's not sort of the regular perspective. But if one does want to broaden it out for the purpose of a philosophical discussion, then I think a variety of very different considerations enter the playing field here. And those considerations, in my view, don't have so much to do with how it would affect society at the time when these are introduced, but more about how they would change the overall future prospects for humanity in the long run. So my view, if some of you have come across my writings, is that humanity in the current human condition is very much an abnormality from almost any conceivable perspective. So obviously in space, we are very abnormal. Like Earth is this unique crumb in a huge vacuum, most of which is uninhabitable. And in time, most of the time the Earth has existed, there were no humans. Even in historical time frames, which is really zooming in. The current epoch is extremely abnormal. We used to live in a Malthusian condition for almost all of human history. And now we take for granted that people can do other things than just trying to scrape by from day to day. And we take for granted that there will be technological change within a lifetime. Like all of these things are extremely unusual from a broader perspective. So my thinking about this broader question of the desirability would be shaped by the consideration of what interventions we could do now would increase the chances that when the human condition changes, as I think it will, it will be for the better. What can we do to improve our chances of a long and prosperous future for humanity? How could we ensure that the transition to machine intelligence or other advanced technologies, technologies will be safe and beneficial for humanity. And then it's no longer a question of so much medical side effects here or there, or whether it increases or decreases inequality or happiness in the short term, but it's sort of whether it positions us to be better placed to develop these radical new technologies safely that we might see perhaps later in this century.
- [35:38]
Ann Kerr
I always worry when people talk about policy on that sort of grand scale, because that isn't actually how policy works, as people who've studied social policy can tell is it's much more incremental, it's much more politicized, and it's much more a matter of certain kinds of elites who engage in these discussions and these worries about the future of humanity and then conjure up solutions to address them. So, I mean, who. The ideas that you have around existential risk are very interesting, but who is worrying about this? What kind of audiences do you tend to speak to about this? Who are the policy makers and the people who have these concerns?
- [36:22]
Nick Bostrom
This is obviously one of the main challenges, because I completely agree that this is very much not the normal perspective in policymaking. It's like a very unusual perspective to actually try to think about what would do the most good in the world, surprisingly. But there are a few people who seem to be interested in this. I mean, this is the reason why I started doing work on that in the first place. And some of my colleagues and some other folk around the world are beginning to, beginning to try to be more. Attempting to be more systematic and careful about how you think of, for example, your philanthropic efforts or your giving to charity. One of my colleagues started this charity, Giving what We can, which is about rational philanthropy. Another, this nonprofit called 80,000 Hours, which is 80,000 hours being roughly the number of hours in a carrier. And what they're trying to do is to get young people and students to stop and think about which career they want. And to the extent that they want to do good in the world, they should recognize that there might be orders of magnitude differences in the amount of good you can do depending on which career path you take. And it's not necessarily that the obvious first guess is the correct one. You might think I should become a doctor and go to Africa and treat kids there. But then if you pause, you might reflect that if instead you become a banker and earn a lot of money, you might be able to fund many doctors to go to Africa and help children. And there might be other ways, but it's actually a non trivial problem to figure out what you should do if you really cared about the world and helping people. So there is a kind of. I mean, I don't know how far this will go, but there is a sort of little ferment in the last few years, a small number of people still, but expanding or beginning to try to apply rationality, as it were, to these kinds of really Big questions. So it would be interesting, I think, to see how far one can take that.
- [38:23]
Moderator
But if you take this sort of broader perspective, I mean, with respect to human enhancement, is there anything, I mean, does that change very much the way we should think about human enhancement?
- [38:35]
Nick Bostrom
Yeah, well, it certainly changes, I think, which kind of considerations become relevant and important now. I think it's very difficult this, as it were, a global perspective, well, altruistic perspective. It's very hard actually to find out even which direction is up and down, as it were, which direction would make things better versus worse. So I'm not at all confident that in that perspective I have the correct answers. But I think one might make a distinction, for instance, between changes that would improve human cognition from changes that would change human emotions or change human values. We tend to be more cautious about the latter. Like that is things that have a risk of corrupting human values. We should maybe delay until we are wiser. Because once your values have been corrupted, although you could go back, you still have the technology to change your emotions, you might not want to anymore. Once you started becoming a different person who values different things, you would no longer see a reason to try to rewind those changes. Whereas cognitive enhancements, if they work well, should hopefully put you in a position to be better able to judge what is desirable as a next step. And so in terms of sequencing here, it might make sense to first focus on things that could make us wiser and smaller, smarter, and delay certain other changes that might ultimately do a lot to improve human well being, but that don't necessarily have the same propensity of increasing our ability to make wise next steps. So that might be one kind of tentative observation that becomes relevant from this wider perspective.
- [40:21]
Ann Kerr
So I think I want to say two things about that. In terms of the benefit to humanity as a whole, why is it that there's no kind of reflection on treating things like child mortality in the developing world or interventions to treat malaria and those kind of vast sort of problems that we face as a global population? That to me would seem to be a kind of obvious thing that we ought to be trying to be doing, which is of course bedeviled by huge amounts of political and economic barriers to addressing. But that would seem to be to me more important than thinking about making people more altruistic or the other kinds of enhancements that we're talking about. They seem to be very much aimed at already quite wealthy and benefited population rather than the population as a whole.
- [41:21]
Nick Bostrom
Yeah, I mean, so there is actually a lot of Focus on developing world charity, like giving what we can, that I mentioned earlier, that has been so far their exclusive focus in terms of finding the most cost effective charities to actually help people, mainly in Africa. Deworming programs and some other things seem to be very good there. But the reason is that the reason for why I still think that there should be more focus on say existential risk is a. That there is almost nothing on that at the moment. There are just a few people who are thinking about this compared to a massive development economics field and like large scale philanthropies that are working to help with. But also that the focus of insofar as enhancement comes into this, it's not because it would make people happier now. It's because if we adopt this wider perspective, it might put us in a better position to manage this critical transition later in the century. So it might be that there are certain very challenging technical problems that will be confronted that might require greater than what is currently human intolerance to solve.
- [42:34]
Moderator
For example, what do you have in mind there?
- [42:36]
Nick Bostrom
The control. So I'm currently writing a book about superintelligence, the future of machine intelligence. And it's a tangent here, but we'll sort of wind it back to our discussion anyway. So my hypothesis there is that at some point we might create greater than human machine intelligence. Superintelligence kind of could be extremely powerful under certain circumstances. It might be in a position to shape the future. That then raises the question that if and when we do get the capability to create such a thing, how could we ensure that it will be safe and beneficial? It's the control problem. If you create something extremely powerful and super intelligent, how could you control what it will do? So it will have some kind of beneficial effect. Now that control problem seems to be very difficult. And there are a number of approaches like we know some approaches that look promising at first actually don't work, and we don't yet know an approach that certainly would work. So that would be an example of the kind of question where it might be that it's just that kind of roughly at the edge of current human ability to figure out a solution to it. So maybe it's slightly beyond. So one of the reasons for thinking that perhaps cognitive enhancement would be desirable from an existential risk mitigation point of view is that could help with a problem like that.
- [43:55]
Ann Kerr
So I suppose the other thing I wanted to say really which relates to this is that these ideas about being more intelligent is better for humanity and being more rational and being more Altruistic, I think, are, you know, we should pause around those. Who gets to define those terms and we should pause around the idea that any intelligent core of individuals can be a benefit to humanity. Because I think we've seen ideas in the past about those kind of elites that have been deeply problematic and have led to all sorts of people being persecuted in various forms. So I think that's. I'm wary of that kind of argument for those very sound historical, historical reasons. And I think as well, you know, really clever people often think that being more clever is what everybody wants and that that would be a good thing. But I'm not sure that it is. I think if you look around us and we think about what, what would benefit humanity in its broader sense, but also, you know, people living now today, I think that it's more basic things that are important. And I think that that's why I. Again, I have very many qualms about the kind of. Not that I would want to step in and say ban this and stop this and don't do that and don't write your book or anything like that. It's just that I think we ought to be very cautious and careful around these things for those reasons.
- [45:32]
Nick Bostrom
Yeah, it's just hard to make it to carve out a little subset of cleverness that's unimportant from the wider set of things that we seem to assume is important in our daily work. Like when you're like working in higher education system or you're striving for the truth every day through your publications, through your teaching, try to encourage people to think for themselves, to be more reflective about things. That's really what I mean by cognitive enhancement. It's not this kind of, you know, you're better at puns or sort of clever whipping, mathematic logic, chopping arguments. It's the kind of a broader range of capabilities that make us better able to understand the world. So I mean, it's possible that that will make things worse. But one needs to recognize that if one really believes that it has radical consequences for what we should be doing in higher education. We should not lament ineffective and wasteful university bureaucracies. We should cherish them because they reduce the rate at which universities make people smart. So it's very easy to sort of. So it's a very radical conclusion is what I'm suggesting, that if one really thinks that cognitive enhancement is bad, then there are whole sorts of corollaries of that, that that would really make one go very much against the Grain of.
- [46:55]
Moderator
Current society that's bad, necessary for everyone, but it might not also be desirable for everyone.
- [47:02]
Ann Kerr
I mean, I suppose just to speak personally for a moment, I think I've always, you know, many of us here probably, and certainly academics have always wanted to be, you know, wanted to do well and wanted to be the cleverest and to do very well and to teach the students. Students to make. To have success and all of those things. But I think now, as I look at my own family and my own kids, I always assumed that they would go to university. Now I'm not so sure, just because of the way in which the economy has taken a turn for the worse. And I kind of think, well, maybe that's okay, you know, why do they have to go to university? Why do they have to be clever like that? Is that going to make them happier? Is that going to make the world happier? Maybe if they do a job that is socially useful and productive, hopefully not bankers, then, you know, that would be increasing. They would make a valuable contribution to society, and that would be a good thing.
- [48:01]
Nick Bostrom
Well, the banker, if they actually did give their money to the right causes, could make that.
- [48:06]
Ann Kerr
I think that's a sticking point, isn't it?
- [48:08]
Nick Bostrom
So that depends on your values. But I mean, on that I kind of agree. I mean, it's a sideline, but I mean, I think there is this problematic assumption right now that among in many social circles that unless you go to the university, you've somehow failed. I think that's just unfortunate because that, I think, plays into the signaling function of higher education, that because it's such a common thing to do if you don't have a degree, it's. Many employers would think that there must be some disadvantage, some reason, and that's unfortunate. I think.
- [48:41]
Moderator
I think we should perhaps at this point open up the discussion to questions from the audience, which I'm sure there are many.
- [48:47]
Ann Kerr
So let's just start right there. Yeah. With the red sweater.
- [48:53]
Moderator
I think there's a microphone coming around. So if you could just wait until you have the microphone in your hand.
- [49:05]
Nick Bostrom
Hello, my name is Gertz Von Furd. Nick, I have a question for you about the idea that we should try to enhance our intelligence to make better decisions about how we will apply ourselves for the better and to, you know, strive for the good life in an effective way. And I agree with you that we're very much ignorant about what this good life will be, especially when it comes to the longer term. However, to equate cognitive ability with wisdom, the word you used is I think, a mistake. Wisdom to me it seems still a bit comes with age and time rather than with or not as the case might be. Well, that's a good question. But if we use our intelligence to advance our intelligence, then you get into a sort of intelligence square acceleration paradigm that leads, as some of the authors you refer to, I think a singularity or explosion where we can't predict what the outcome will be. So to invest our resources in more intelligence is kind of a leap of faith that that will be for the better and not for the worse. We're actually, the only thing that I'm pretty sure of is that more time would make the possibility of it developing for the worse smaller. So in fact we should invest all our resources in, you know, upping the bureaucracy in universities or even effectively decreasing the level of intelligence and cognitive abilities in the people that are most eager to advance them. What do you think so? Well, so what I think of that is that, well, a. I agree that intelligence does not equal wisdom. I mean, there are a number of factors that come into wisdom aside from whatever cleverness can be biased or have an interest or be narrow minded, like all of these things would detract. Also there is a distinction between individual intelligence and wisdom from collective intelligence and wisdom. So if what determines what humanity does is this more collective understanding, then there are many other things one could do aside from enhancing individuals that might improve our collective wisdom understanding. Now as for the question of whether enhancing, say let's say wisdom or intelligence individually and or socially, whether that would decrease existential risk, it's a difficult question. I think to first order approximation, maybe there would be two effects of this. One, it would tend to make everything go faster, like technological development across a wide range of areas and scientific development would just happen faster with more intelligent people. So that might just bring us to the precipice sooner. But then again, even if we move slower, we'd still get there eventually. So then it brings into play the second effect of increased intelligence, which is that not only might it increase the speed at which sort of technological civilization is moving forward, it might also increase the range that we can, that is, we might be able better to anticipate certain kinds of consequences and pitfalls. So you could imagine a kind of sufficiently large number of monkeys typing on typewriters or dumb humans making a little trial and error and eventually they develop advanced technologies. But they never do it by planning ahead or thinking about long term consequences. They just try a lot of different things and eventually finding something to work and then like an evolutionary process, it moves forward. So they have sort of zero foresight. Whereas the same amount of progress done by more intelligent people might rely less on trial and error and more on kind of actually having a vision of where you want to get to. And so to the extent that increasing individual or cognitive ability would tend to increase our sort of horizon, widen our horizon, as well as move us faster towards, seems to me a good guess it would be that it would reduce existential risk imbalance. But it's for some such fairly subtle reason that that would work. So it's not obvious that that is. But I mean, that's my best guess currently.
- [53:13]
Ann Kerr
Do you want to add something to that?
- [53:16]
Moderator
We'll take the question, Nick.
- [53:22]
Audience Member 1
It seems to me that this idea of human enhancement almost necessitates a sort of sense of what being human means. Because, I mean, if you take like a group of 20 people confronted with a half completed sculpture of a human torso, we don't know yet whether there's going to be a male sculpture or female sculpture, whether it's going to be fat or slim or tall or not, or whether it's going to have the features of a working person or a lesser person. We don't know what the perfect human being would be. So I think that would be great. So if we try to enhance that half finished sculpture, depending on who completes it or who enhances it, we would go into different directions. I'm sure the conservatives and labor in this country would both think that what they do is clearly for the best of humanity, but we would have great arguments whether we agree with one or the other side. So my question is what issue? I mean, I have a sense that you've got this sort of sense of an area of a kind of a superhuman, a kind of sort of superior human in mind. It'd be quite interesting if you could elaborate on your kind of superhuman. I was thinking, I mean, like, I think Hitler had similar ideas, but maybe you can improve on it. Second question. Enhancement can also go the other way. It's not necessarily improvement. If you think of LSD, for example, in the 1960s, which was, as far as I understand, prototyped in the Vietnam War and was in part meant to make soldiers more effective at killing. But it of course also is claimed to be a great enhancer of consciousness and all the rest. So, you know, again, when it comes to enhancement, you know, whether something is just a drug, whether something makes us better killing machines or more competitive animals, whether it makes us more, you know, better human beings. Again, there's a huge political debate and divide around that. So maybe again, you could elaborate on how you would decide what qualifies as a good thing and what qualifies as a bad thing.
- [55:24]
Nick Bostrom
So I think to some extent one doesn't need to. If one does focus instead on general purpose capacities. So there are some general human functionings that are good for leading a very wide variety of different kinds of lives. So most obviously there are sort of physical health that is useful, whether you want to be an artist or a banker or philosopher or whatever. You want to have lungs that can actually absorb oxygen and so forth. And I think similarly, like neurological development is useful for a wide range of different kind of human ideals. So for the same reason that we remove lead from the tap water, because it damages brain development, if there were some similar thing we could add to the tap water that would promote brain development, I would favor that for the same reason, not because I have a very particular view of what sort of the ideal human would look like, but just because that seems to be something that would be broadly beneficial across a very wide range of different ideas about what one wants to achieve in life.
- [56:28]
Moderator
Do you want to comment on that second aspect?
- [56:30]
Nick Bostrom
Well, yeah, I mean, unfortunately a lot of technologies are being driven by military interests, both sort of other kinds of technologies like drones and surveillance stuff and all of that. And to some extent human enhancement as well. What we have today is actually mainly a side effect of medical research focused on diseases. So all these things we mentioned, Ritalin and Monet, they've all been developed initially to treat diseases. Then it turns out maybe that could help healthy individuals as well. But insofar as there is any attempt to develop enhancements because of their enhancement effects, rather than as a side effect, that's very limited. And it's mainly some efforts by darpa in the US to kind of create the war fighter of the 21st century that can eat grass and doesn't need to sleep for days. And it's, I think, sad that that's the motive that is pushing some of these efforts.
- [57:34]
Ann Kerr
I think, in relation to the point about what kind of humans are we trying to intervene with, I think it is important to recognise that people who are disabled or have certain kinds of impairments don't necessarily want to be improved along these sorts of lines. So even, for example, people who have cystic fibrosis would say, obviously they want to have antibiotics and access to drugs and physical therapy to improve the capacity of their lungs. But I think that there were many people in the cystic fibrosis community who were very wary of and not so interested in genetic technologies like genetic therapy because it was basic kinds of access to drugs and treatments that they wanted. And then of course there are people who we are quite content to live in bodies that are slightly falling apart and not doing all that we want them to do because that's part of the human condition.
- [58:37]
Moderator
Okay, there were two questions. We can take them since they're sitting.
- [58:42]
Ann Kerr
Right next to each other.
- [58:45]
Moderator
Yeah, you two there.
- [58:51]
Nick Bostrom
I have a question for Professor Kerr about certain kinds of human enhancements that I think you would actually approve. And I just want to check if I can very, very briefly suggest three human enhancement that would make bankers more compassionate and more likely to give their well earned. Give their earned monies away for philanthropic reasons. Secondly, if there was an enhancement that would make policymakers less parochial, less say, fussy, less tribal, less politically minded. And thirdly, if there was an enhancement that would make really clever people, but less blinkered by their own prejudices and by their own cognitive biases. If there were drugs or some genetic enhancements that would make these enhancements possible, would you approve?
- [59:35]
Ann Kerr
Well, no, not really, no. I think that it's just farcical to try and address those things via drugs. And I don't really have a very strong belief in the idea that you could come up with a drug that would make people more compassionate. So I prefer old fashioned methods like progressive taxation.
- [59:56]
Nick Bostrom
The old fashioned methods don't seem to be working very well and we seem to be in a bit of a crisis.
- [59:59]
Ann Kerr
That doesn't mean that. I mean, of course they don't work very well, but that doesn't mean to say that they could work and that they haven't worked and the past, because I think that they have. And I think that the kind of social arrangements that we have at the moment are by no means inevitable. And I think that there is a potential for political will to address them. And I would much rather invest my time and energy in promoting that.
- [60:30]
Nick Bostrom
You talk about human homiltence as absolutes rather than I'm an economist and so I use things like opportunity costs. Take for example university education, which we obviously think is a human enhancement. We give us three, five, ten years of educational ability in academia. But for example, another person may go and work for three years and therefore he's more enhanced when applying for jobs because he has his three years of experience. Surely it's about opportunity costs, not actually about absolutes. Every drug has a side effect. If I take whatever Lance Armstrong took when cycling. I've shortened my career. I might be faster for two years, but I've only got a three year career rather than a ten year career.
- [61:10]
Audience Member 1
There's always, there's no absolute with these things.
- [61:16]
Ann Kerr
Yeah.
- [61:17]
Nick Bostrom
Now opportunity costs have to be taken into account. I think education has a huge opportunity cost because it takes so much time. If it were a matter of popping a vitamin pill every morning, it doesn't have a very large opportunity cost because you can do that and take advantage of whatever other opportunities you had. So on a case by case basis, the opportunity cost might be large or small, but it's obviously they should not be forgotten in the calculation. Okay.
- [61:53]
Ann Kerr
Colin, just for a second, the microphone's coming. And probably as a foundation of society, if you remember, kids used to have milk, kids used to have free milk in the school. At the time when nutrition was not very good in the UK that was a stop. And recently Professor Winston did some research giving kids fish oil in school to improve without drugs, to improve concentration and probably to supply the lack of nutrition that nowadays we have. So what I propose is if we change the education, if we put in the curriculum, good nutrition will create healthy bodies, will create healthy minds. If we put good economics in the curriculum and good ethics, we probably enhance society because then we are having a healthy body, a healthy mind and a healthy society. So probably we have to start from education and this is not private. Or the state education because it will be in the curriculum and all kids will have the obligations to know how to treat their body, how consequently have a healthy mind and how to treat society. So it's probably quite simple and you don't need Modafinil or things like that.
- [63:26]
Nick Bostrom
Yeah, I think that the low hanging fruits today are often simple things like that. They're just like exercise or nutrition. So I agree with that. I mean, I think that that particular study on the fish oil needs to be replicated and just to see that it actually bears up. But if it does have this effect, then I think it would make a lot of sense to either dish out more fish in cafeterias in school or hand out fish oil pills. I don't really care which of those. I mean, if they actually do the job of helping kids learn in school and being healthier, I would be all for it. Question for Professor Bostrom. I know you're very familiar with transhumanism and Ray Kurzweil and all of his thinking. Do you believe that in our lifetime, sort of, if you extrapolate Moore's Law and the rate at which computers get more intelligent, that we will actually see breakthrough, really radical changes in AI and life extension and things like that. And, and if we do get there, and whether it's in our lifetime or not, do you think there's going to be serious governmental and policy pushback that will stifle some of that innovation? Thanks. Well, the first question, I mean, the answer is we don't know how long some of these technologies will take to arrive. It's very difficult to predict technology timelines. 11 is gone beyond what is currently sort of in development like Target. It might happen 30 years from now, it might take 80 years, or it might happen next century. What we need to do, instead of thinking of a point prediction, we need to have a probability distribution that we smear out over a wide range of possible arrival dates, including some that are within the lifetime of a lot of people here. So that cannot be excluded whether there will be a lot of pushback. Well, I think that the amount of public debate and discussion on these things will increase as they sort of become more realistic. What the effect of that would be is hard to say. There is at least currently a kind of a competitive world order where you could imagine that some nations will try to delay certain developments, but then once they see that some other nation is plowing forward, then they will be tempted to say we must not fall behind. The economic competitiveness of our nation requires that we do this, that, and the other. So my default guess, I guess, is that things will kind of continue like that as they are now, mainly driven by kind of diverse and scattered commercial reasons and the hobbies of different scientists rather than any grand vision of where we want to get to. But it's possible that as these kind of bigger prospects come into view, that they will be harder and harder to ignore and that at some point, say, different states might embark on program to develop like critical breakthrough technologies in AI or some sort of eugenics program. I could imagine. I don't know whether this will happen, but it's unconceivable that China, say 20 years from now, ones that really are genetic selection technologies, would try to roll that out or some other country like that. But yeah, that's also hard to predict. It's hard to break the timescales and it's hard to predict, predict kind of the political responses.
- [66:54]
Moderator
Did you want to add something to.
- [66:56]
Nick Bostrom
No.
- [66:56]
Ann Kerr
Okay.
- [66:57]
Moderator
I think we have some questions up in the front. Yeah, in the front row. Why don't you start? There's a microphone behind you.
- [67:08]
Ann Kerr
So in the beginning of the debate, it was assumed or implicitly assumed that.
- [67:12]
Moderator
Positive eugenics are bad or wrong. And just to be very clear, I'm not asking about the attendant sort of problems with eugenics, for example, that regimes that engage in this tend to also engage in, say, genocide. I'm only talking about the eugenics itself. Now, what exactly about positive eugenics does society find wrong, bad or off putting? Why is this something that we can.
- [67:34]
Ann Kerr
Just assume, oh, we don't want to go down that road. So just to give an example of positive eugenics, to answer that, the ideas that were promoted in this country around getting the middle classes to have more children, implication being that the working classes and the feckless ought to have less. So a kind of positive program of tax breaks to encourage wealthy, intelligent people to have more children, what would be wrong with that? Well, it's a waste of resource and effort. It's not actually tackling need and benefiting children who are living in poverty. And it would seem to me to be more important to tackle, to work with the kids who are already here rather than to try and encourage other children to be born into already wealthy families. It's also, I just have a kind of visceral sort of reaction to it because it's elitist and it's patronizing and I can't imagine that it would necessarily happen nowadays. But you never know with the current government.
- [68:53]
Nick Bostrom
It is. I mean, there are different. So for example, in Cyprus there is this big government program to try to eliminate thalassemia, which is, is this blood disease by genetic counseling. So before getting married, you have to have yourself checked whether you have this gene, and then you can decide whether you want to get married or not after that. But you have the information. So that has, I think, more than half the incidence of this disease there. And a lot of other countries have, it's common for pregnant mothers, especially older mothers, to screen for down syndrome. And then some people then select to have an abortion as a result of that, which is also seeming to have the effect of reducing the rate at which kids are born with that. And so it is kind of happening when there's like negative selection, I guess. But I could easily see that once it actually becomes possible to test for more conditions, including positive traits, that a lot of parents will take that into account as well, especially if they are doing some in vitro fertilization procedure where they actually have to select which embryo to implant and then might use all the information available and make some kind of overall judgment as to which embryo to select based not just on whether they lack a certain disease gene, but also whether they possess some disposition or tendency to develop whatever health or athletic ability or whatever it might be.
- [70:17]
Ann Kerr
So dealing with those kinds of examples, for example, first of all, screen for down syndrome. I think the problem with that is that it becomes an obligation rather than a choice for many people. And you end up on a kind of conveyor belt when you're offered testing. And there's huge problems with that in terms of the obligations it creates for mothers to work. I'm not sure it actually is reducing incidence of down syndrome that much either more generally because of course that links to women as they age, having children and the instances of down syndrome increases in that respect. So I'm not sure that that's necessarily the case in relation to presymptomatic testing and screening and other kinds of interventions in assessed conception. I mean, I think the problem with that is a better example was probably to look at egg donation practices where there's selection for positive traits. So college girls with eggs where they talk about their race and their intelligence, ability, and those are positive reasons for clients to purchase those eggs. I think that that's problematic.
- [71:35]
Nick Bostrom
What about ordinary reproduction? People tend to favor mating with people who are smart and healthy and beautiful. I mean, we are programmed as eugenic beings. You don't just randomly select somebody from the population. This is why we have mate preference.
- [71:52]
Ann Kerr
So I think I probably don't believe in these kinds of evolutionary arguments for how people reproduce. I think people reproduce because of lots of different kind of social and cultural reasons which are not biologically driven.
- [72:08]
Moderator
Lots of follow up. Let's take a question upstairs.
- [72:12]
Audience Member 2
I have a question about kind of like the legislations actually on this. I want to kind of like give my view on this. I mean, the thing is, as we are human, I think we will always enhance because we are creative beings and it's in our nature to enhance ourselves. Like for example, the clothing wear, you know, it kind of like defines us, you know, it defines our identities, gender. But also it helps us to explore the world. You know, like, for example, you know, it help us to dive, it help us to go to the, you know, space. They are all kind of like, you know, kind of like clothing enhancements. But the thing is, how can we protect also the market exploiting these enhancements? I work in the creative industry and we kind of like work for emerging markets and in the emerging markets, in the Asian market, for example, there is a kind of like a market for having fairer skin and it is kind of like a sociological problem there. And the thing is, because there are creams and also nutritional supplements are available, it's been actually, you know, exploited by the market, even by the, you know, Western companies who are kind of like trying to exploit these markets and what kind of legislations could be put in place. You know, companies are actually kind of like saying that, you know, they are there to help the society, but then, you know, they're actually not doing the other way. Like the, you know, products that we use in this market, they are actually available over their brands, you know, for making the skin fairer. Do you want to have a stab at that?
- [74:13]
Ann Kerr
Well, I think technologies like that, there's probably an argument that because of the risks that they pose to people's healths, that the legislation ought to be used to kind of control the markets. Of course, that's easier said than done because the reality is that you can purchase these things on the Internet in an unregulated form.
- [74:35]
Audience Member 2
Corporates like Union Humor, l' Oreal are doing that, you know, and their legislations missing their out, basically. You know, it's like being century backwards. You know, it's like we haven't improved at all. And they are using their social void because quite a big issue, the cast issue there. And, you know, I mean, the thing is, there's also another thing. In this market, we actually kind of like, you know, use bronzing products, kind.
- [75:06]
Nick Bostrom
Of like the chigger.
- [75:07]
Audience Member 2
And it is actually a freedom of choice, you know, to change our appearance. But then it is actually exploited there because there's an understanding that if you're a bearer, then you're a higher being.
- [75:20]
Ann Kerr
Basically.
- [75:23]
Moderator
Sort of that sort of matches, I think some of the concerns you mentioned earlier at the beginning of the discussion.
- [75:28]
Ann Kerr
Right. And I mean, I think it's always very difficult to talk about banning these kinds of technologies that we think are problematic because once they're available and they've been developed, you can't kind of. There's no point in bolting the stable door once the horse is bolted in that sense. But I think that there are ways in which you can encourage markets to invest in other kinds of things. So it's a sort of positive incentive to develop technologies for which aren't the problem. I take. Okay.
- [76:02]
Moderator
Yeah, there's one question. Yep, there's lots of questions I'm trying to get you. Otherwise probably won't be able to. They're in the front row and then we can make.
- [76:12]
Nick Bostrom
Thank you. Thank you. This is a follow up on an earlier question for Professor Bostrom, I completely agree that as humans we should try to be more intelligent and that we should try to improve our cognitive ability. However, I'm not sure that educating is the same as medicating or encouraging people to have laptops is the same as giving cognitive ability pills. And I sort of too, had the. Was it a visceral reaction that Professor Kerr talked about? I too have that. But I'm wondering, is there an ethical or philosophical argument behind that suggests that we shouldn't tamper with our own bodies and we shouldn't try. Try to improve ourselves like this? Yeah, there are. I mean, I'm not terribly persuaded by these attempts to provide general philosophical arguments against enhancement. I think there have been some efforts, particularly by the bioconservatives in the United States during. So during President Bush, he set up this big bioethics council, President's Council on Bioethics, and put in Leon Cass to share that. And they wrote various reports on human enhancement and generally tried to show that all human enhancements were bad. But I thought their argumentation was very weak. It kind of appealed. It's hard to summarize it because it's some sort of idea of the natural state and it's unnatural and it subverts our true human nature and all of these things. So life extension bad, cognitive enhancement bad, like it be, could go through the list. I think the more interesting arguments that I have seen have been more specific, focusing on individual enhancements in particular context and particular effects, rather than some general prohibition against tampering with nature. There have been others who have tried to do something. Habermas, Fukuyama Sandel, who's a Harvard political philosopher, has argued that we need to price this openness to the unbidden which it has, that this general attitude of just welcoming whatever happens is very valuable in itself. And once we go in and try to achieve a particular outcome, say, through enhancement, that then means that we'll lose this value of being open to. So when you have a kid, you don't want to necessarily think of it as a sort of engineering project. You want to have this sense of the parents welcoming it for its own sake and accepting it. And then he tries to sort of build on that to make a more general case against enhancement. I think also not entirely persuasive, but.
- [78:41]
Moderator
It seemed to me that you were appealing to maybe something similar when you made the distinction between cognitive enhancement and affecting our emotions, for instance. I mean, you seem to want to say that maybe we should distinguish between different types of enhancement and not all of them to be welcomed to the same extent.
- [78:58]
Nick Bostrom
Oh, no, I certainly think that different enhancements need to be welcomed to different extents and some may be turned away at the door. But the reason for thinking maybe we should be cautious with the emotional ones was this broader perspective. If one thinks of what will reduce existential risk, and if you simplify it, then there are two kinds of enhancements, ones that change what we want and ones that change our ability to judge what we should want or what will get us what we want. Maybe it makes sense to do the latter kind first to then put us in a better position to figure out what other enhancements we should do as well. So that's.
- [79:34]
Moderator
But purely. So that's purely from a sort of minimizing risk point of view, rather than saying that there's something maybe intrinsically valuable to having certain emotions.
- [79:43]
Nick Bostrom
Oh, of course there is something, I think, intrinsically valuable to having different emotions.
- [79:48]
Moderator
You know, like, say you break out with someone, would you want to take a pill to just make the pain go away?
- [79:54]
Nick Bostrom
That's, in fact another reason for thinking one should be probably cautious with these kind of personality, precisely because you can sort of maybe draw a line. And there are some enhancements that are sort of unambiguously or some changes that are unambiguously good. So if you cure somebody, like a child from cancer or you think that's unambiguously good, like, then I think cognitive enhancements are usually at the middle of the line. So if ordinary medical enhancements kind of are unambiguous, usually they're not even true. There. There are many cases of medical interventions that are ambiguous, but overall we have some fairly good idea of what is healthy and what is good enough that we can see why NHS is a good idea and stuff like that. Cognitive enhancements, it gets more complicated. Say, what is a good memory? It's. Well, we have some idea, like, we know that some people have a better memory than others, but it's not necessarily the case that just being able to remember more facts is better. There are other functions of memory, like being able to generalize from experience, detecting the general patterns in experience rather than just remembering a sequence of data points. So there we have some idea of what a good memory is, but it's also complex and there could be different kinds of good memory or memories that are good in different ways. And still, I think with cognitive enhancement, we have a reasonable good idea of what's up and down. But once we get to personality, I think It's a lot more complex even to say what is a good personality. I mean, I think there are some cases where you can say that someone is suicidally depressed. It would be better if they weren't. So we have some idea. But it's a hugely deep, thick, philosophical normative task to form an opinion about what we want there, which also makes one cautious about just rushing in with the first kind of pill we get and then making sure that everybody's smiling all the time. And maybe we lose some of these more subtle values that are really crucial, but that were less obvious. So maybe delaying some of those interventions until we have grown up more and thought about this for maybe a few hundred years more or whatever might be a good idea.
- [81:51]
Moderator
Do you want to have the last words?
- [81:53]
Ann Kerr
Thank. I actually agree.
- [81:55]
Moderator
So we have consensus, and at the end of the debate, unfortunately, we're out of time. I do apologize to all of those who couldn't ask their questions. Please join me in thanking our two speakers. And thank you to those of you who asked really interesting questions as well tonight.