Best problems to work on?

80,000 hours has a lovely overview of “What are the biggest problems in the world?” The best part is that each problem gets its own profile with a description, arguments in favor and against, and what already exists. I couldn’t resist plotting the table in 3D:

Most important problems according to 80,000 Hours, according to scale, neglectedness, and solvability. Color denotes the sum of the values.

There are of course plenty of problems not listed; even if these are truly the most important there will be a cloud of smaller scale problems to the right. They list a few potential ones like cheap green energy, peace, human rights, reducing migration restrictions, etc.

I recently got the same question, and here are my rough answers:

Fixing our collective epistemic systems. Societies work as cognitive systems: acquiring information, storing, filtering and transmitting it, synthesising it, making decisions, and implementing actions. This is done through individual minds, media and institutions. Recently we have massively improved some aspects through technology, but it looks like our ability to filter, organise and jointly coordinate has not improved – in fact, many feel it has become worse. Networked media means that information can bounce around multiple times acquiring heavy bias, while filtering mechanisms relying on authority has lost credibility (rightly or wrongly). We are seeing all sorts of problems of coordinating diverse, polarised, globalised or confused societies. Decision-making that is not reality-tracking due to (rational or irrational) ignorance, bias or misaligned incentives is at best useless, at worst deadly. Figuring out how to improve these systems seem to be something with tremendous scale (good coordination and governance helps solve most problems above), it is fairly neglected (people tend to work on small parts rather than figuring out better systems), and looks decently solvable (again, many small pieces may be useful together rather than requiring a total perfect solution).
Ageing. Ageing kills 100,000 people per day. It is a massive cause of suffering, from chronic diseases to loss of life quality. It causes loss of human capital at nearly the same rate as all education and individual development together. A reduction in the health toll from ageing would not just save life-years, it would have massive economic benefits. While this would necessitate changes in society most plausible shifts (changing pensions, the concepts of work and life-course, how families are constituted, some fertility reduction and institutional reform) the cost and trouble with such changes is pretty microscopic compared to the ongoing death toll and losses. The solvability is improving: 20 years ago it was possible to claim that there were no anti-ageing interventions, while today there exist enough lab examples to make this untenable. Transferring these results into human clinical practice will however be a lot of hard work. It is also fairly neglected: far more work is being spent on symptoms and age-related illness and infirmity than root causes, partially for cultural reasons.
Existential risk reduction: I lumped together all the work to secure humanity’s future into one category. Right now I think reducing nuclear war risk is pretty urgent (not because of the current incumbent of the White House, but simply because the state risk probability seems to dominate the other current risks), followed by biotechnological risks (where we still have some time to invent solutions before the Collingridge dilemma really bites; I think it is also somewhat neglected) and AI risk (I put it as #3 for humanity, but it may be #1 for research groups like FHI that can do something about the neglectedness while we figure out better how much priority it truly deserves). But a lot of the effort might be on the mitigation side: alternative food to make the world food system more resilient and sun-independent, distributed and more robust infrastructure (whether better software security, geomagnetic storm/EMP-safe power grids, local energy production, distributed internet solutions etc.), refuges and backup solutions. The scale is big, most are neglected and many are solvable.

Another interesting set of problems is Robin Hanson’s post about neglected big problems. They are in a sense even more fundamental than mine: they are problems with the human condition.

As a transhumanist I do think the human condition entails some rather severe problems – ageing and stupidity is just two of them – and that we should work to fix them. Robin’s list may not be the easiest to solve, though (although there might be piecemeal solutions worth doing). Many enhancements, like moral capacity and well-being, have great scope and are very neglected but lose out to ageing because of the currently low solvability level and the higher urgency of coordination and risk reduction. As I see it, if we can ensure that we survive (individually and collectively) and are better at solving problems, then we will have better chances at fixing the tougher problems of the human condition.

Review of the cyborg bill of rights 1.0

The Cyborg Bill of Rights 1.0 is out. Rich MacKinnon suggests the following rights:

FREEDOM FROM DISASSEMBLY
A person shall enjoy the sanctity of bodily integrity and be free from unnecessary search, seizure, suspension or interruption of function, detachment, dismantling, or disassembly without due process.

FREEDOM OF MORPHOLOGY
A person shall be free (speech clause) to express themselves through temporary or permanent adaptions, alterations, modifications, or augmentations to the shape or form of their bodies. Similarly, a person shall be free from coerced or otherwise involuntary morphological changes.

RIGHT TO ORGANIC NATURALIZATION
A person shall be free from exploitive or injurious 3rd party ownerships of vital and supporting bodily systems. A person is entitled to the reasonable accrual of ownership interest in 3rd party properties affixed, attached, embedded, implanted, injected, infused, or otherwise permanently integrated with a person’s body for a long-term purpose.

RIGHT TO BODILY SOVEREIGNTY
A person is entitled to dominion over intelligences and agents, and their activities, whether they are acting as permanent residents, visitors, registered aliens, trespassers, insurgents, or invaders within the person’s body and its domain.

EQUALITY FOR MUTANTS
A legally recognized mutant shall enjoy all the rights, benefits, and responsibilities extended to natural persons.

As a sometime philosopher with a bit of history of talking about rights regarding bodily modification, I of course feel compelled to comment.

What are rights?

First, what is a right? Clearly anybody can state that we have a right to X, but only some agents and X-rights make sense or have staying power.

One kind of rights are legal rights of various kinds. This can be international law, national law, or even informal national codes (for example the Swedish allemansrätten, which is actually not a moral/human right and actually fairly recent). Here the agent has to be some legitimate law- or rule-maker. The US Bill of Rights is an example: the result of a political process that produced legal rights, with relatively little if any moral content. Legal rights need to be enforceable somehow.

Then there are normative moral principles such as fundamental rights (applicable to a person since they are a person), natural rights (applicable because of facts of the world) or divine rights (imposed by God). These are universal and egalitarian: applicable everywhere, everywhen, and the same for everybody. Bentham famously dismissed the idea of natural rights as “nonsense on stilts” and there is a general skepticism today about rights being fundamental norms. But insofar they do exist, anybody can discover and state them. Moral rights need to be doable.

While there may be doubts about the metaphysical nature of rights, if a society agrees on a right it will shape action, rules and thinking in an important way. It is like money: it only gets value by the implicit agreement that it has value and can be exchanged for goods. Socially constructed rights can be proposed by anybody, but they only become real if enough people buy into the construction. They might be unenforceable and impossible to perform (which may over time doom them).

What about the cyborg rights? There is no clear reference to moral principles, and only the last one refers to law. In fact, the preamble states:

Our process begins with a draft of proposed rights that are discussed thoroughly, adopted by convention, and then published to serve as model language for adoption and incorporation by NGOs, governments, and rights organizations.

That is, these rights are at present a proposal for social construction (quite literally) that hopefully will be turned into a convention (a weak international treaty) that eventually may become national law. This also fits with the proposal coming from MacKinnon rather than the General Secretary of the UN – we can all propose social constructions and urge the creation of conventions, treaties and laws.

But a key challenge is to come up with something that can become enforceable at some point. Cyborg bodies might be more finely divisible and transparent than human bodies, so that it becomes hard to regulate these rights. How do you enforce sovereignty against spyware?

Justification

Why is a right a right? There has to be a reason for a right (typically hinted at in preambles full of “whereas…”)

I have mostly been interested in moral rights. Patrick D. Hopkins wrote an excellent overview “Is enhancement worthy of being a right?” in 2008 where he looks at how you could motivate morphological freedom. He argues that there are three main strategies to show that a right is fundamental or natural:

That the right conforms to human nature. This requires showing that it fits a natural end. That is, there are certain things humans should aim for, and rights help us live such lives. This is also the approach of natural law accounts.
That the right is grounded in interests. Rights help us get the kinds of experiences or states of the world that we (rightly) care about. That is, there are certain things that are good for us (e.g. “the preservation of life, health, bodily integrity, play, friendship, classic autonomy, religion, aesthetics, and the pursuit of knowledge”) and the right helps us achieve this. Why those things are good for us is another matter of justification, but if we agree on the laundry list then the right follows if it helps achieve them.
That the right is grounded in our autonomy. The key thing is not what we choose but that we get to choose: without freedom of choice we are not moral agents. Much of rights by this account will be about preventing others from restricting our choices and not interfering with their choices. If something can be chosen freely and does not harm others, it has a good chance to be a right. However, this is a pretty shallow approach to autonomy; there are more rigorous and demanding ideas of autonomy in ethics (see SEP and IEP for more). This is typically how many fundamental rights get argued (I have a right to my body since if somebody can interfere with my body, they can essentially control me and prevent my autonomy).

One can do this in many ways. For example, David Miller writes on grounding human rights that one approach is to allow people from different cultures to live together as equals, or basing rights on human needs (very similar to interest accounts), or the instrumental use of them to safeguard other (need-based) rights. Many like to include human dignity, another tricky concept.

Social constructions can have a lot of reasons. Somebody wanted something, and this was recognized by others for some reason. Certain reasons are cultural universals, and that make it more likely that society will recognize a right. For example, property seems to be universal, and hence a right to one’s property is easier to argue than a right to paid holidays (but what property is, and what rules surround it, can be very different).

Legal rights are easier. They exist because there is a law or treaty, and the reasons for that are typically a political agreement on something.

It should be noted that many declarations of rights do not give any reasons. Often because we would disagree on the reasons, even if we agree on the rights. The UN declaration of human rights give no hint of where these rights come from (compare to the US declaration of independence, where it is “self-evident” that the creator has provided certain rights to all men). Still, this is somewhat unsatisfactory and leaves many questions unanswered.

So, how do we justify cyborg rights?

In the liberal rights framework I used for morphological freedom we could derive things rather straightforwardly: we have a fundamental right to life, and from this follows freedom from disassembly. We have a fundamental right to liberty, and together with the right to life this leads to a right to our own bodies, bodily sovereignty, freedom of morphology and the first half of the right to organic naturalization. We have a right to our property (typically derived from fundamental rights to seek our happiness and have liberty), and from this the second half of the organic naturalization right follows (we are literally mixing ourselves rather than our work with the value produced by the implants). Equality for mutants follow from having the same fundamental rights as humans (note that the bill talks about “persons”, and most ethical arguments try to be valid for whatever entities count as persons – this tends to be more than general enough to cover cyborg bodies). We still need some justification of the fundamental rights of life, liberty and happiness, but that is outside the scope of this exercise. Just use your favorite justifications.

The human nature approach would say that cyborg nature is such that these rights fit with it. This might be tricky to use as long as we do not have many cyborgs to study the nature of. In fact, since cyborgs are imagined as self-creating (or at least self-modifying) beings it might be hard to find any shared nature… except maybe the self-creation part. As I often like to argue, this is close to Mirandola’s idea of human dignity deriving from our ability to change ourselves.

The interest approach would ask how the cyborg interests are furthered by these rights. That seems pretty straightforward for most reasonably human-like interests. In fact, the above liberal rights framework is to a large extent an interest-based account.

The autonomy account is also pretty straightforward. All cyborg rights except the last are about autonomy.

Could we skip the ethics and these possibly empty constructions? Perhaps: we could see the cyborg bill of rights as a way of making a cyborg-human society possible to live in. We need to tolerate each other and set boundaries on allowed messing around with each other’s bodies. Universals of property lead to the naturalization right, territoriality the sovereignty right universal that actions under self-control are distinguished from those not under control might be taken as the root for autonomy-like motivations that then support the rest.

Which one is best? That depends. The liberal rights/interest system produces nice modular rules, although there will be much arguments on what has precedence. The human nature approach might be deep and poetic, but potentially easy to disagree on. Autonomy is very straightforward (except when the cyborg starts messing with their brain). Social constructivism allows us to bring in issues of what actually works in a real society, not just what perfect isolated cyborgs (on a frictionless infinite plane) should do.

Parts of rights

One of the cool properties of rights is that they have parts – “the Hohfeldian incidents“, after Wesley Hohfeld (1879–1918) who discovered them. He was thinking of legal rights, but this applies to moral rights too. His system is descriptive – this is how rights work – rather than explaining why the came about or whether this is a good thing. The four parts are:

Privileges (alias liberties): I have a right to eat what I want. Someone with a driver’s licence has the privilege to drive. If you have a duty not do do something, then you have no privilege about it.

Claims: I have a claim on my employer to pay my salary. Children have a claim vis-a-vis every adult not to be abused. My employer is morally and legally dutybound to pay, since they agreed to do so. We are dutybound to refrain from abusing children since it is wrong and illegal.

These two are what most talk about rights deal. In the bill, the freedom from disassembly and freedom of morphology are about privileges and claims. The next two are a bit meta, dealing with rights over the first two:

Powers: My boss has the power to order me to research a certain topic, and then I have a duty to do it. I can invite somebody to my home, and then they have the privilege of being there as long as I give it to them. Powers allow us to change privileges and claims, and sometimes powers (an admiral can relieve a captain of the power to command a ship).

Immunities: My boss cannot order me to eat meat. The US government cannot impose religious duties on citizens. These are immunities: certain people or institutions cannot change other incidents.

These parts are then combined into full rights. For example, my property rights to this computer involve the privilege to use the computer, a claim against others to not use the computer, the power to allow others to use it or to sell it to them (giving them the entire rights bundle), and an immunity of others altering these rights. Sure, in practice the software inside is of doubtful loyalty and there are law-enforcement and emergency situation exceptions, but the basic system is pretty clear. Licence agreements typically give you a far

Sometimes we speak about positive and negative rights: if I have a negative right I am entitled to non-interference from others, while a positive right entitles me to some help or goods. My right to my body is a negative right in the sense that others may not prevent me from using or changing my body as I wish, but I do not have a positive right to demand that they help me with some weird bodymorphing. However, in practice there is a lot of blending going on: public healthcare systems give us positive rights to some (but not all) treatment, policing gives us a positive right of protection (whether we want it or not). If you are a libertarian you will tend to emphasize the negative rights as being the most important, while social democrats tend to emphasize state-supported positive rights.

The cyborg bill of rights starts by talking about privileges and claims. Freedom of morphology clearly expresses an immunity to forced bodily change. The naturalization right is about immunity from unwilling change of the rights of parts, and an expression of a kind of power over parts being integrated into the body. Sovereignty is all about power over entities getting into the body.

The right of bodily sovereignty seems to imply odd things about consensual sex – once there is penetration, there is dominion. And what about entities that are partially inside the body? I think this is because it is trying to reinvent some of the above incidents. The aim is presumably to cover pregnancy/abortion, what doctors may do, and other interventions at the same time. The doctor case is easy, since it is roughly what we agree on today: we have the power to allow doctors to work on our bodies, but we can also withdraw this whenever we want

Some other thoughts

The recent case where the police subpoenad the pacemaker data of a suspected arsonist brings some of these rights into relief. The subpoena occurred with due process, so it was allowed by the freedom from disassembly. In fact, since it is only information and that it is copied one can argue that there was no real “disassembly”. There have been cases where police wanted bullets lodged in people in order to do ballistics on them, but US courts have generally found that bodily integrity trumps the need for evidence. Maybe one could argue for a derived right to bodily privacy, but social needs can presumably trump this just as it trumps normal privacy. Right now views on bodily integrity and privacy are still based on the assumption that bodies are integral and opaque. In a cyborg world this is no longer true, and the law may well move in a more invasive direction.

“Legally recognized mutant”? What about mutants denied legal recognition? Legal recognition makes sense for things that the law must differentiate between, not for things the law is blind to. Legally recognized mutants (whatever they are) would be a group that needs to be treated in some special way. If they are just like natural humans they do not need special recognition. We may have laws making it illegal to discriminate against mutants, but this is a law about a certain kind of behavior rather than the recipient. If I racially discriminate against somebody but happens to be wrong about their race, I am still guilty. So the legal recognition part does not do any work in this right.

And why just mutants? Presumably the aim here is to cover cyborgs, transhumans and other prefix-humans so they are recognized as legal and moral agents with the same standing. The issue is whether this is achieved by arguing that they were human and “mutated”, or are descended from humans, and hence should have the same standing, or whether this is due to them having the right kind of mental states to be persons. The first approach is really problematic: anencephalic infants are mutants but hardly persons, and basing rights on lineage seems ripe for abuse. The second is much simpler, and allows us to generalize to other beings like brain emulations, aliens, hypothetical intelligent moral animals, or the Swampman.

This links to a question that might deserve a section on its own: who are the rightsholders? Normal human rights typically deal with persons, which at least includes adults capable of moral thinking and acting (they are moral agents). Someone who is incapable, for example due to insanity or being a child, have reduced rights but are still a moral patient (someone we have duties towards). A child may not have full privileges and powers, but they do have claims and immunities. I like to argue that once you can comprehend and make use of a right you deserve to have it, since you have capacity relative to the right. Some people also think prepersons like fertilized eggs are persons and have rights; I think this does not make much sense since they lack any form of mind, but others think that having the potential for a future mind is enough to grant immunity. Tricky border cases like persistent vegetative states, cryonics patients, great apes and weird neurological states keep bioethicists busy.

In the cyborg case the issue is what properties make something a potential rightsholder and how to delineate the border of the being. I would argue that if you have a moral agent system it is a rightsholder no matter what it is made of. That is fine, except that cyborgs might have interchangeable parts: if cyborg A gives her arm to cyborg B, have anything changed? I would argue that the arm switched from being a part of/property of A to being a part of/property of B, but the individuals did not change since the parts that make them moral agents are unchanged (this is just how transplants don’t change identity). But what if A gave part of her brain to B? A turns into A’, B turns into B’, and these may be new agents. Or what if A has outsourced a lot of her mind to external systems running in the cloud or in B’s brain? We may still argue that rights adhere to being a moral agent and person rather than being the same person or a person that can easily be separated from other persons or infrastructure. But clearly we can make things really complicated through overlapping bodies and minds.

Summary

I have looked at the cyborg bill of rights and how it fits with rights in law, society and ethics. Overall it is a first stab at establishing social conventions for enhanced, modular people. It likely needs a lot of tightening up to work, and people need to actually understand and care about its contents for it to have any chance of becoming something legally or socially “real”. From an ethical standpoint one can motivate the bill in a lot of ways; for maximum acceptance one needs to use a wide and general set of motivations, but these will lead to trouble when we try to implement things practically since they give no way of trading one off against another one in a principled way. There is a fair bit of work needed to refine the incidences of the rights, not to mention who is a rightsholder (and why). That will be fun.

Did amphetamines help Erdős?

During my work on the Paris talk I began to wonder whether Paul Erdős (who I used as an example of a respected academic who used cognitive enhancers) could actually have been shown to have benefited from his amphetamine use, which began in 1971 according to Hill (2004). One way of investigating is his publication record: how many papers did he produce per year before or after 1971? Here is a plot, based on Jerrold Grossman’s 2010 bibliography:

Productivity of Paul Erdos over his life. Green dashed line: amphetamine use, red dashed line: death. Crosses mark named concepts.

The green dashed line is the start of amphetamine use, and the red dashed life is the date of death. Yes, there is a fairly significant posthumous tail: old mathematicians never die, they just asymptote towards zero. Overall, the later part is more productive per year than the early part (before 1971 the mean and standard deviation was 14.6±7.5, after 24.4±16.1; a Kruskal-Wallis test rejects that they are the same distribution, p=2.2e-10).

This does not prove anything. After all, his academic network was growing and he moved from topic to topic, so we cannot prove any causal effect of the amphetamine: for all we know, it might have been holding him back.

One possible argument might be that he did not do his best work on amphetamine. To check this, I took the Wikipedia article that lists things named after Erd ő s, and tried to find years for the discovery/conjecture. These are marked with red crosses in the diagram, slightly jittered. We can see a few clusters that may correspond to creative periods: one in 35-41, one in 46-51, one in 56-60. After 1970 the distribution was more even and sparse. 76% of the most famous results were done before 1971; given that this is 60% of the entire career it does not look that unlikely to be due to chance (a binomial test gives p=0.06).

Again this does not prove anything. Maybe mathematics really is a young man’s game, and we should expect key results early. There may also have been more time to recognize and name results from the earlier career.

In the end, this is merely a statistical anecdote. It does show that one can be a productive, well-renowned (if eccentric) academic while on enhancers for a long time. But given the N=1, firm conclusions or advice are hard to draw.

Erdős’s friends worried about his drug use, and in 1979 Graham bet Erdős $500 that he couldn’t stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdős accepted, and went cold turkey for a complete month. Erdős’s comment at the end of the month was “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.” He then immediately started taking amphetamines again. (Hill 2004)

Limits of morphological freedom

My talk “Morphological freedom: what are the limits to transforming the body?” was essentially a continuation of my original morphological freedom talk from 2001. Now with added philosophical understanding and linking to some of the responses to the original paper. Here is a quick summary:

Enhancement and extensions

I began by a few cases: Liz Parrish self-experimenting with gene therapy to slow her ageing, Paul Erdös using drugs for cognitive enhancement, Todd Huffman exploring the realm of magnetic vision using an implanted magnet, Neil Harbisson gaining access to the realm of color using sonification, Stelarc doing body modification and extension as performance art, and Erik “The Lizardman” Sprague transforming into a lizard as an existential project.

It is worth noting that several of these are not typical enhancements amplifying an existing ability, but about gaining access to entirely new abilities (I call it “extension”). Their value is not instrumental, but lies in the exploration or self-transformation. They are by their nature subjective and divergent. While some argue enhancement will by their nature be convergent (I disagree) extensions definitely go in all directions – and in fact gain importance from being different.

Morphological freedom and its grounding

Morphological freedom, “The right to modify one’s body (or not modify) according to one’s desires”, can be derived from fundamental rights such as the right to life and the right to pursue happiness. If you are not free to control your own body, your right to life and freedom are vulnerable and contingent: hence you need to be allowed to control your body. But I argue this includes a right to change the body: morphological freedom.

One can argue about what rights are, or if they exist. If there are such things, there is however a fair consensus that life and liberty is on the list. Similarly, morphological freedom seems to be so intrinsically tied together with personhood that it becomes inalienable: you cannot remove it from a person without removing an important aspect of what it means to be a person.

These arguments are about fundamental rights rather than civil and legal rights: while I think we should make morphological freedom legally protected, I do think there is more to it than just mutual agreement. Patrick Hopkins wrote an excellent paper analysing how morphological freedom could be grounded. He argued that there are three primary approaches: grounding it in individual autonomy, in human nature, or in human interests. Autonomy is very popular, but Hopkins thinks much of current discourse is a juvenile “I want to be allowed to do what I want” autonomy rather than the more rational or practical concepts of autonomy in deontological or consequentialist ethics. One pay-off is that these concepts do imply limits to morphological freedom to undermine one’s own autonomy. Grounding in human nature requires a view of human nature. Transhumanists and many bioconservatives actually find themselves allies against the relativists and constructivists that deny any nature: they merely disagree on what the sacrosanct parts of that nature are (and these define limits of morphological freedom). Transhumanists think most proposed enhancements are outside these parts, the conservatives think they cover nearly any enhancement. Finally, grounding in what makes humans truly flourish again produces some ethically relevant limits. However, the interest account has trouble with extensions: at best it can argue that we need exploration or curiosity.

One can motivate morphological freedom in many other ways. One is that we need to explore: both because there may be posthuman modes of existence of extremely high value, and because we cannot know the value of different changes without trying them – the world is too complex to be reliably predicted, and many valuable things are subjective in nature. One can also argue we have some form of duty to approach posthumanity, because this approach is intrinsically or instrumentally important (consider a transhumanist reading of Nietzsche, or cosmist ideas). This approach typically seem to require some non-person affecting value. Another approach is to argue morphological freedom is socially constructed within different domains; we have one kind of freedom in sport, another one in academia. I am not fond of this approach since it does not explain how to handle the creation of new domains or what to do between domains. Finally, there is the virtue approach: self-transformation can be seen as a virtue. By this perspective we are not only allowed to change ourselves, we ought to since it is part of human excellence and authenticity.

Limits

Limits to morphological freedom can be roughly categorized as practical/prudential, issues of willingness to change/identity, the ethical limits, and the social limits.

Practical/prudential limits

Safety is clearly a constraint. If an enhancement is too dangerous, then the risk outweighs the benefit and it should not be done. This is tricky to evaluate for more subjective benefits. The real risk boundary might not be a risk/benefit trade-off, but whether risk is handled in a responsible manner. The difference between being a grinder and doing self-harm consists in whether one is taking precautions and regard pain and harms as problems rather than the point of the exercise.

There are also obvious technological and biological limits. I did not have the time to discuss them, but I think one can use heuristics like the evolutionary optimality challenge to make judgements about feasibility and safety.

Identity limits

Even in a world where anything could be changed with no risk, economic cost or outside influence it is likely that many traits would remain stable. We express ourselves through what we transform ourselves into, and this implies that we will not change what we consider to be prior to that. The Riis, Simmons and Goodwin study showed that surveyed students were much less willing to enhance traits that were regarded more relevant to personal identity than peripheral traits. Rather than “becoming more than you are” the surveyed students were interested in being who they are – but better at it. Morphological freedom may hence be strongly constrained by the desire to maintain a variant of the present self.

Ethical limits

Beside the limits coming from the groundings discussed above, there are the standard constraints of not harming or otherwise infringing on the rights of others, capacity (what do we do about prepersons, children or the deranged?) and informed consent. The problem here is not any disagreement about the existence of the constraints, but where they actually lie and how they actually play out.

Social limits

There are obvious practical social limits for some morphological freedom. Becoming a lizard affects your career choices and how people react to you – the fact that maybe it shouldn’t does not change the fact that it does.

There are also constraints from externalities: morphological freedom should not unduly externalize its costs on the rest of society.

My original paper has got a certain amount of flak from the direction of disability rights, since I argued morphological freedom is a negative right. You have a right to try to change yourself, but I do not need to help you – and vice versa. The criticism is that this is ableist: to be a true right there must be social support for achieving the inherent freedom. To some extent my libertarian leanings made me favour a negative right, but it was also the less radical choice: I am actually delighted that others think we need to reshape society to help people self-transform, a far more radical view. I have some misgivings about the politics of this, prioritization tends to be nasty business, it means that costs will be socially externalized, and in the literature there seem to be some odd views about who gets to say what bodies are authentic or not, but I am all in favour of a “commitment to the value, standing, and social legibility of the widest possible (and an ever-expanding) variety of desired morphologies and lifeways.”

Another interesting discourse has been about the control of the body. While in medicine there has been much work to normalize it (slowly shifting towards achieving functioning in one’s own life), in science the growth of ethics review has put more and more control in the hands of appointed experts, while in performance art almost anything goes (and attempts to control it would be censorship). As Goodall pointed out, many of the body-oriented art pieces are as much experiments in ethics as they are artistic experiments. They push the boundaries in important ways.

Touch the limits

In the end, I think this is an important realization: we do not fully know the moral limits of morphological freedom. We should not expect all of them to be knowable through prior reasoning. This is a domain where much is unknown and hard for humans to reason about. Hence we need experiments and exploration to learn them. We should support this exploration since there is much of value to be found, and because it embodies much of what humanity is about. Even when we do not know it yet.

Enhancing dogs not to lie

On Practical Ethics I blog about dogs on drugs.

Or more specifically, the ethics of indigenous hunting practices where dogs are enhanced in various ways by drugs – from reducing their odour over stimulants to hallucinogens that may enhance their perception. Is this something unnatural, too instrumental, or harm their dignity? I unsurprisingly disagree. These drugs may even be in the interest of the dog itself. In fact, the practice might be close to true to animal enhancement.

Still, one can enhance for bad reasons. I am glad I discovered Kohn’s paper “How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement” on human-dog relationships in Amazon, since it shows just how strange – for an outsider – the epistemic and ethical thinking of a culture can be. Even if we take a cultural relativist position and say that of course dogs should be temporarily uplifted along the chain of being so they can be told by a higher species how to behave, from an instrumental standpoint it looks unlikely that that particular practice actually works. A traditionally used drug or method may actually not work for the purpose its users intend (from what I know of traditional European medicine, a vast number of traditional remedies were actually pointless yet persisted), but because of epistemic problems it persists (it is traditional, no methods for evidence based medicine, hard to tell apart the intended effect from the apparent effect). It wouldn’t surprise me that a fair number of traditional dog enhancements are in this domain.

Do we want the enhanced military?

Some notes on Practical Ethics inspired by Jonathan D. Moreno’s excellent recent talk.

My basic argument is that enhancing the capabilities of military forces (or any other form of state power) is risky if the probability that they can be misused (or the amount of expected/maximal damage in such cases) does not decrease more strongly. This would likely correspond to some form of moral enhancement, but even the morally enhanced army may act in a bad manner because the values guiding it or the state commanding it are bad: moral enhancement as we normally think about it is all about coordination, the ability to act according to given values and to reflect on these values. But since moral enhancement itself is agnostic about the right values those values will be provided by the state or society. So we need to ensure that states/societies have good values, and that they are able to make their forces implement them. A malicious or stupid head commanding a genius army is truly dangerous. As is tails wagging dogs, or keeping the head unaware (in the name of national security) of what is going on.

In other news: an eclipse in a teacup:

Future Humans: science fiction and human enhancement

Recording of a fun panel we (Imre Bard, Caroline Edwards, Adam Roberts and me) had at the LSE 2015 literary festival about science fiction, human enhancement and cyborgs. Are cyborgs neoliberal, and what about collectivist libertarian solutions like information markets?

Fair brains?

Yesterday I gave a lecture at the London Futurists, “What is a fair distribution of brains?”:

My slides can be found here (PDF, 4.5 Mb).

My main take-home messages were:

Cognitive enhancement is potentially very valuable to individuals and society, both in pure economic terms but also for living a good life. Intelligence protects against many bad things (from ill health to being a murder victim), increases opportunity, and allows you to create more for yourself and others. Cognitive ability interacts in a virtuous cycle with education, wealth and social capital.

That said, intelligence is not everything. Non-cognitive factors like motivation are also important. And societies that leave out people – due to sexism, racism, class divisions or other factors – will lose out on brain power. Giving these groups education and opportunities is a very cheap way of getting a big cognitive capital boost for society.

I was critiqued for talking about “cognitive enhancement” when I could just have talked about “cognitive change”. Enhancement has a built in assumption of some kind of improvement. However, a talk about fairness and cognitive change becomes rather anaemic: it just becomes a talk about what opportunities we should give people, not whether these changes affect their relationship in a morally relevant way.

Distributive justice

Theories of distributive justice typically try to answer: what goods are to be distributed, among whom, and what is the proper distribution? In our case it would be cognitive enhancements, and the interested parties are at least existing people but could include future generations (especially if we use genetic means).

Egalitarian theories argue that there has to be some form of equality, either equality of opportunity (everybody gets to enhance if they want), equality of outcome (everybody equally smart). Meritocratic theories would say the enhancement should be distributed by merit, presumably mainly to those who work hard at improving themselves or have already demonstrated great potential. Conversely, need-based theories and prioritarians argue we should prioritize those who are worst off or need the enhancement the most. Utilitarian justice requires the maximization of the total or average welfare across all relevant individuals.

Most of these theories agree with Rawls that impartiality is important: it should not matter who you are. Rawls famously argued for two principles of justice: (1) “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.”, and (2) “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.”

It should be noted that a random distribution is impartial: if we cannot afford to give enhancement to everybody, we could have a lottery (meritocrats, prioritarians and utilitarians might want this lottery to be biased by some merit/need weighting, or to be just between the people relevant for getting the enhancement, while egalitarians would want everybody to be in).

Why should we even care about distributive justice? One argument is that we all have individual preferences and life goals we seek to achieve; if all relevant resources are in the hands of a few, there will be less preference satisfaction than if everybody had enough. In some cases there might be satiation, where we do not need more than a certain level of stuff to be satisfied and the distribution of the rest becomes irrelevant, but given the unbounded potential ambitions and desires of people it is unlikely to apply generally.

Many unequal situations are not seen as unjust because that is just the way the world is: it is a brute biological fact that males on average live shorter than females, and that there is a random distribution of cognitive ability. But if we change the technological conditions, these facts become possible to change: now we can redistribute stuff to affect them. Ironically, transhumanism hopes/aims to change conditions so that some states, which are at present not unjust, will become unjust!

Some enhancements are absolute: they help you or society no matter what others do, others are merely positional. Positional enhancements are a zero-sum game. However, doing the reversal test demonstrates that cognitive ability has absolute components: a world where everybody got a bit more stupid is not a better world, despite the unchanged relative rankings. There is more accidents and mistakes, more risk that some joint threat cannot be handled, and many life projects become harder and impossible to achieve. And the Flynn effect demonstrates that we are unlikely to be at some particular optimum right now.

The Rawlsian principles are OK with enhancement of the best-off if that helps the worst-off. This is not unreasonable for cognitive enhancement: the extreme high performers have a disproportionate output (patents, books, lectures) that benefit the rest of society, and the network effects of a generally smarter society might benefit everyone living in it. However, less cognitively able people are also less able to make use of opportunities created by this: intelligence is fundamentally a limit to equality of opportunity, and the more you have, the more you are able to select what opportunities and projects to aim for. So a Rawlsian would likely be fairly keen on giving more enhancement to the worst off.

Would a world where everybody had same intelligence be better than the current one? Intuitively it seems emotionally neutral. The reason is that we have conveniently and falsely talked about intelligence as one thing. As several audience members argued, there are many parts of intelligence. Even if one does not buy Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory, it is clear that there are different styles of problem-solving and problem-posing. This is true even if measurements of the magnitude of mental abilities are fairly correlated. A world where everybody thought in the same way would be a bad place. We might not want bad thinking, but there are many forms of good thinking. And we benefit from diversity of thinking styles. Different styles of cognition can make the world more unequal but not more unjust.

Inequality over time

As I have argued before, enhancements in the forms of gadgets and pills are likely to come down in price and become easy to distribute, while service-based enhancements are more problematic since they will tend to remain expensive. Modelling the spread of enhancement suggests that enhancements that start out expensive but then become cheaper first leads to a growth of inequality and then a decrease. If there is a levelling off effect where it becomes harder to enhance beyond a certain point this eventually leads to a more cognitively equal society as everybody catches up and ends up close to the efficiency boundary.

When considering inequality across time we should likely accept early inequality if it leads to later equality. After all, we should not treat spatially remote people differently from nearby people, and the same is true across time. As Claudio Tamburrini said, “Do not sacrifice poor of the future for the poor of the present.”

The risk is if there is compounding: enhanced people can make more money, and use that to enhance themselves or their offspring more. I seriously doubt this works for biomedical enhancement since there are limits to what biological brains can do (and human generation times are long compared to technology change), but it may be risky in regards to outsourcing cognition to machines. If you can convert capital into cognitive ability by just buying more software, then things could become explosive if the payoffs from being smart in this way are large. However, then we are likely to have an intelligence explosion anyway, and the issue of social justice takes back seat compared to the risks of a singularity. Another reason to think it is not strongly compounding is that geniuses are not all billionaires, and billionaires – while smart – are typically not the very most intelligent people. Pickety’s argument actually suggests that it is better to have a lot of money than a lot of brains since you can always hire smart consultants.

Francis Fukuyama famously argued that enhancement was bad for society because it risks making people fundamentally unequal. However, liberal democracy is already based on idea of common society of unequal individuals – they are different in ability, knowledge and power, yet treated fairly and impartially as “one man, one vote”. There is a difference between moral equality and equality measured in wealth, IQ or anything else. We might be concerned about extreme inequalities in some of the latter factors leading to a shift in moral equality, or more realistically, that those factors allow manipulation of the system to the benefit of the best off. This is why strengthening the “dominant cooperative framework” (to use Allen Buchanan’s term) is important: social systems are resilient, and we can make them more resilient to known or expected future challenges.

Conclusions

My main conclusions were:

Enhancing cognition can make society more or less unequal. Whether this is unjust depends both on the technology, one’s theory of justice, and what policies are instituted.
Some technologies just affect positional goods, and they make everybody worse off. Some are win-win situations, and I think much of intelligence enhancement is in this category.
Cognitive enhancement is likely to individually help the worst off, but make the best off compete harder.
Controlling mature technologies is hard, since there are both vested interests and social practices around them. We have an opportunity to affect the development of cognitive enhancement now, before it becomes very mainstream and hard to change.
Strengthening the “dominant cooperative framework” of society is a good idea in any case.
Individual morphological freedom must be safeguarded.
Speeding up progress and diffusion is likely to reduce inequality over time – and promote diversity.
Different parts of the world likely to approach CE differently and at different speeds.

As transhumanists, what do we want?

The transhumanist declaration makes wide access a point, not just on fairness or utilitarian grounds, but also for learning more. We have a limited perspective and cannot know well beforehand were the best paths are, so it is better to let people pursue their own inquiry. There may also be intrinsic values in freedom, autonomy and open-ended life projects: not giving many people the chance to this may lose much value.

Existential risk overshadows inequality: achieving equality by dying out is not a good deal. So if some enhancements increases existential risk we should avoid them. Conversely, if enhancements look like they reduce existential risk (maybe some moral or cognitive enhancements) they may be worth pursuing even if they are bad for (current) inequality.

We will likely end up with a diverse world that will contain different approaches, none universal. Some areas will prohibit enhancement, others allow it. No view is likely to become dominant quickly (without rather nasty means or some very surprising philosophical developments). That strongly speaks for the need to construct a tolerant world system.

If we have morphological freedom, then preventing cognitive enhancement needs to point at a very clear social harm. If the social harm is less than existing practices like schooling, then there is no legitimate reason to limit enhancement. There are also costs of restrictions: opportunity costs, international competition, black markets, inequality, losses in redistribution and public choice issues where regulators become self-serving. Controlling technology is like controlling art: it is an attempt to control human creativity and exploration, and should be done very cautiously.

Contraire de l’esprit de l’escalier: enhancement and therapy

Yesterday I participated in a round-table discussion with professor Miguel Benasyag about the therapy vs. enhancement distinction at the TransVision 2014 conference. Unfortunately I could not get in a word sidewise, so it was not much of a discussion. So here are the responses I wanted to make, but didn’t get the chance to do: in a way this post is the opposite of l’esprit de l’escalier.

Enhancement: top-down, bottom-up, or sideways?

Does enhancements – whether implanted or not – represent a top-down imposition of order on the biosystem? If one accepts that view, one ends up with a dichotomy between that and bottom-up approaches where biosystems are trained or placed in a smart context that produce the desired outcome: unless one thinks imposing order is a good thing, one becomes committed to some form of naturalistic conservatism.

But this ignores something Benasyag brought up himself: the body and brain are flexible and adaptable. The cerebral cortex can reorganize to become a primary cortex for any sense, depending on which input nerve is wired up to it. My friend Todd’s implanted magnet has likely reorganized a small part of his somatosensory cortex to represent his new sense. This enhancement is not a top-down imposition of a desired cortical structure, neither a pure bottom-up training of the biosystem.

Real enhancements integrate, they do not impose a given structure. This also addresses concerns of authenticity: if enhancements are entirely externally imposed – whether through implantation or external stimuli – they are less due to the person using them. But if their function is emergent from the person’s biosystem, the device itself, and how it is being used, then it will function in a unique, personal way. It may change the person, but that change is based on the person.

Complex enhancements

Enhancements are often described as simple, individualistic, atomic, things. But actual enhancements will be systems. A dramatic example was in my ears: since I am both French- and signing-impaired, I could listen to (and respond to) comments thanks to an enhancing system involving three skilled translators, a set of wireless headphones and microphones. This system was not just complex, but it was adaptive (translators know how to improvise, we the users learned how to use it) and social (micro-norms for how to use it emerged organically).

Enhancements need a social infrastructure to function – both a shared, distributed knowledge of how and when to use them (praxis) and possibly a distributed functioning itself. A brain-computer interface is of little use without anybody to talk to. In fact, it is the enhancements that affect communication abilities that are most powerful both in the sense of enhancing cognition (by bringing brains together) and changing how people are socially situated.

Cochlear implants and social enhancement

This aspect of course links to the issues in the adjacent debate about disability. Are we helping children by giving them cochlear implants, or are we undermining a vital deaf cultural community. The unique thing about cochlear implants is that they have this social effect and have to be used early in life for best results. In this case there is a tension between the need to integrate the enhancement with the hearing and language systems in an authentic way, a shift in which social community which will be readily available, and concerns over that this is just used to top-down normalize away the problem of deafness. How do we resolve this?

The value of deaf culture is largely its value to members: there might be some intrinsic value to the culture, but this is true for every culture and subculture. I think it is safe to say there is a fairly broad consensus in western culture today that individuals should not sacrifice their happiness – and especially not be forced to do it – for the sake of the culture. It might be supererogatory: a good thing to do, but not something that can be demanded. Culture is for the members, not the other way around: people are ends, not means.

So the real issue is the social linkages and the normalisation. How do we judge the merits of being able to participate in social networks? One might be small but warm, another vast and mainstream. It seems that the one thing to avoid is not being able to participate in either. But this is not a technical problem as much as a problem of adaptation and culture. Once implants are good enough that learning to use them does not compete with learning signing the real issue becomes the right social upbringing and the question of personal choices. This goes way beyond implant technology and becomes a question of how we set up social adaptation processes – a thick, rich and messy domain where we need to do much more work.

It is also worth considering the next step. What if somebody offered a communications device that would enable an entirely new form of communication, and hence social connection? In a sense we are gaining that using new media, but one could also consider something direct, like Egan’s TAP. As that story suggests, there might be rather subtle effects if people integrate new connections – in his case merely epistemic ones, but one could imagine entirely new forms of social links. How do we evaluate them? Especially since having a few pioneers test them tells us less than for non-social enhancements. That remains a big question.

Justifying off-label enhancement

A somewhat fierce question I got (and didn’t get to respond to) was how I could justify that I occasionally take modafinil, a drug intended for use of narcoleptics.

There seems to be a deontological or intention-oriented view behind the question: the intentions behind making the drug should be obeyed. But many drugs have been approved for one condition and then use expanded to other conditions. Presumably aspirin use for cardiovascular conditions is not unethical. And pharma companies largely intend to make money by making medicines, so the deep intention might be trivial to meet. More generally, claiming the point of drugs is to help sick people (who we have an obligation to help) doesn’t work since there obviously exist drug use for non-sick people (sports medicine, for example). So unless many current practices are deeply unethical this line of argument doesn’t work.

What I think was the real source was the concern that my use somehow deprived a sick person of the use. This is false, since I paid for it myself: the market is flexible enough to produce enough, and it was not the case of splitting a finite healthcare cake. The finiteness case might be applicable if we were talking about how much care me and my neighbours would get for our respective illnesses, and whether they had a claim on my behaviour through our shared healthcare cake. So unless my interlocutor thought my use was likely to cause health problems she would have to pay for, it seems that this line of reasoning fails.

The deep issue is of course whether there is a normatively significant difference between therapy and enhancement. I deny it. I think the goal of healthcare should not be health but wellbeing. Health is just an enabling instrumental thing. And it is becoming increasingly individual: I do not need more muscles, but I do benefit from a better brain for my life project. Yours might be different. Hence there is no inherent reason to separate treatment and enhancement: both aim at the same thing.

That said, in practice people make this distinction and use it to judge what care they want to pay for for their fellow citizens. But this will shift as technology and society changes, and as I said, I do not think this is a normative issue. Political issue, yes, messy, yes, but not foundational.

What do transhumanists think?

One of the greatest flaws of the term “transhumanism” is that it suggests that there is something in particular all transhumanist believe. Benasayag made some rather sweeping claims about what transhumanists (enhancement as embodying body-hate and a desire for control) wanted to do that were most definitely not shared by the actual transhumanists in the audience or stage. It is as problematic as claiming that all French intellectuals believe something: at best a loose generalisation, but most likely utterly misleading. But when you label a group – especially if they themselves are trying to maintain an official label – it becomes easier to claim that all transhumanists believe in something. Outsiders also do not see the sheer diversity inside, assuming everybody agrees on the few samples of writing they have read.

The fault here lies both in the laziness of outside interlocutors and in transhumanists not making their diversity clearer, perhaps by avoiding slapping the term “transhumanism” on every relevant issue: human enhancement is of interest to transhumanists, but we should be able to discuss it even if there were no transhumanists.

Back to the future: neurohacking and the microcomputer revolution

My talk at LIFT 2014 Basel, <a href=”http://videos.liftconference.com/video/10528321/anders-sandberg-the-man-machine-are”>The Man-Machine: Are we living in the 1970s of brain hacking?</a> can now be viewed online (slides (pdf)).

My basic thesis is that the late 70s and early 80s microcomputer revolution might be a useful analogy for what might be happening with neurohacking today: technology changes are enabling amateur and startup experimentation that will in the long run lead to useful, society-changing products that people grow up with and accept. 20 years down the line we may be living in an enhanced society where some of the big neuro-players started up in the near future and became the Apple and Microsoft of enhancement.

A bit more detail:

In the 70s the emergence of microprocessors enabled the emergence of microcomputers, far cheaper than the mainframes and desk-sized minicomputers that had come before. They were simple enough to be sold as kits to amateurs. The low threshold to entry led to the emergence of a hobbyist community, small start-ups and cluster formation (helped by the existence of pre-existing tech clusters like Silicon Valley). The result was intense growth, diversity and innovation. The result was a generation exposed to the technology, accepting it as cool or even ordinary, laying the foundation for later useful social and economic effects – it took 20+ years to actually have an effect on productivity! Some things take time, and integrating a new technology into society may take a generation.

Right now we have various official drivers for neural enhancement like concerns about an ageing society, chronic diseases, stress, lifelong learning and health costs. But the actual drivers of much of the bottom-up neurohacking seem to be exploration, innovation and the hacker ethos of taking something beyond its limits. Neurotechnologies may be leaving the confines of hospitals and becoming part of home or lifestyle technologies. Some, like enhancer drugs, are tightly surrounded by regulations and are likely to be heavily contested. Meanwhile many brain stimulation, neurofeedback and life monitoring devices exist in a regulatory vacuum and can evolve unimpeded. The fact that they are currently not very good is no matter: the 70s home computers were awful too, but they could do enough cool things to motivate users and innovation.

Why is there a neurotech revolution brewing? Part of it is technology advances: we already have platforms like computers, smartphones, wifi and arduinos available, enabling easy construction of new applications. Powerful signal processing can be done onboard, data mining in the cloud. Meanwhile costs for these technologies have been falling fast, and crowdsourcing is enabling new venues of funding for niche applications. The emergence of social consumers allow fast feedback and customisation. Information sharing has become orders of magnitude more efficient since the 70s, and technical results in neuroscience can now easily be re-used by amateurs as soon as they are published (the hobbyists are unlikely to get fMRI anytime soon, but results gained through expensive methods may then be re-used using cheap rigs).

It seems likely that at least some of these technologies are going to become more acceptable through exposure. Especially since they fit with the move towards individualized health concepts, preventative medicine and self-monitoring. The difference between a FitBit, a putative sleep-enhancing phone app, Google Glass and a brain stimulator might be smaller in practice than one expects.

The technology is also going to cause a fair bit of business disruption by challenging traditional monopolies by enabling new platforms, new routes of distribution and access. The personal genomics battle between diagnostic monopolies and companies selling gene tests (not to mention individuals putting genetic information online) is a hint of what may come. Enhancement demands a certain amount of personalisation/fine tuning to work, and might hint of a future of ‘drugs as services’ – drugs may be part of a system of measurement, genetic testing and training rather than standalone chemicals.

Still, hype kills. Neuroenhancement is still slowly making its way up the slope of the hype curve, and will sooner or later reach a hype peak (moral panics, cover of Time Magazine) followed by inevitable disappointment when it doesn’t change everything (or make its entrepreneurs rich overnight). Things tend to take time, and there will be consolidation of the neuromarket after the first bubble.

The long-run effects of a society with neuroenhancement are of course hard to predict. It seems likely that we are going to continue towards a broader health concept – health as an individual choice, linked to individual life projects but also perhaps more of an individual responsibility. Mindstates will be personal choices, with an infrastructure for training, safety and control. Issues of morphological freedom – the right to change onself, and the right not to have change imposed – will be important social negotiations. Regulation can be expected to lag as always, and usually regulate devices based on older and different systems.

Generally, we can expect that our predictions will be bad. But past examples show that early design choices may stay with us for a long time: the computer mouse has not evolved that far from its original uses at Bell Labs and Xerox Parc. Designs also contain ideology: the personal microcomputer was very much a democratisation of computing. Neurohacking may be a democratisation of control over bodies and minds. We may hence want to work hard at shaping the future by designing well today.

Andart II

Part of Anders' Exoself

Enhancement