Institute For The Future

The Difference Between Enhancing Our Environments and Our Brains

A few months ago, the brilliant Dan Ariely wrote a short blog post about what he, as a behavioral economist who sees some significant limits to human cognitive skills, would like to see the world look like in 25 years. What he'd like, in sum, would be to see a large-scale effort to redesign processes and environments with those cognitive limits in mind to make life easier for people to handle. He makes the same general point in his 2009 TED Talk.

 

When it comes to building the physical world, we kind of understand our limitations. We build steps... We understand our limitations. And we build around it. But for some reason when it comes to the mental world, when we design things like healthcare and retirement and stockmarkets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations, even though they don't stare us in the face in the same way, we could design a better world.

 

 

 

 

I've been intrigued by this line of thinking for a while because it feels like such a straightforward and important idea: Admit our limits and find ways to build tools to help us overcome them.

 

Which brings me to the seemingly unrelated concept of enhancement medications--particularly neuroenhancers, like provogil, which help people stay alert and concentrate, or otherwise manage their mental states for non-medical reasons. IFTF Research Fellow Jamais Cascio has made essentially the same argument about neuroenhancers as Dan Ariely makes about redesigning our environments:

 

 

 

[H]ere’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves... [A]dvances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.”

 

 

 

 

Which brings me to two questions: Are these different arguments? And if so, why?

 

My answer to the first is: sort of. Logically, they make basically the same point, which is that we need to accept our limits and build tools to help us overcome them. But for a lot of people, and I include myself here, medicalized enhancements feel much harder to justify than environmental or process enhancements, even though I can recognize that there's no logical difference between using environmental or chemical tools to overcome our limits.

 

Put more concretely: My sense is that most people would be far more likely to accept the idea that someone can redesign a form, or create a commitment contract to improve their health than they would be to accept the idea that someone should, say, inhale synthetic hormones to become more sensitive and to become a better learner. My guess is that most people won't care, or will applaud the redesign of the form. My guess, also, is that most people would be inclined to think about side effects of the neuroenhancers, about unintended consequences, competition between those who do and take the enhancers, and on and on.

 

Which brings me to my second question: Why do chemical options trigger a search for unintended consequences? Why do they feel different?

 

In some sense, I think the answer lies in Dan Ariely's point about the physical and mental world: We want to believe that our brains are up for any challenge. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a core premise of several hundred years of Western philosophical thought. And so while the interventions of behavioral economists are not without their controversy, they feel completely logical and acceptable in comparison to monkeying around with cell-level biology.

 

In the coming decade, we're going to have an increasingly wide array of tools to help us manage and overcome our limits. Some of these tools will be environmental or process-oriented tools; others will be biochemical. My sense is that the process and environmental tools will be relatively acceptable, while chemical and medical enhancements will meet with far more controversy. Should this be the case? Logically, I'd say no. But I'm not sure I feel the same way.