Following this argument, if NZT simply brought Eddie up to par with those around him, its use would probably be seen as okay by most people. But let’s make this a little more complicated. What if NZT did indeed enable Eddie to be an ordinary, functional member of the human race, but he could only get it illicitly. Would we still be alright with this?
It wouldn’t surprise me if, in this case, a substantial part of the collective response was, “Why not legalize it?” Or, at the very least, ensure that anyone who wants to take advantage of the drug could get hold of it reasonably easily, without facing the risk of imprisonment.
Imagine next a low-potency version of NZT that was legal and was marketed as a dietary supplement. I suspect that most people would think that this was alright, in part because there would be a choice of whether to take it or not. And if the substance addressed a minor deficit or displayed marginal benefits, there would be little pressure to use it. As a result, its use would probably slip quite comfortably into our sense of ethically appropriate behavior.
So far, so good. In this Mildly Enhanced Eddie hypothetical, there don’t seem to be glaring ethical issues. But what if we now go back to the NZT that’s portrayed in the movie—a cognitive enhancer that provides the user with immense benefits over those around them?
This moves us from thinking of the substance as a way of correcting a deficit, to one that confers a substantial advantage. And this is where medical ethics begin to run out of steam. But they still have some relevance, especially the medical ethic of “justice.”
Imagine that, in the movie, NZT was as widely and readily available as a generic over-the-counter drug like Tylenol. Would this be okay?
There are obviously questions here around how appropriate it would be for everyone to be dependent on a mind-enhancing substance. But, just on the basis of social justice, this scenario feels not-so-bad. Apart from the poorest of the poor, most people would be able to afford to pop a pill to increase their smarts if they wanted to. Because of this, the benefits and the risks of NZT would most likely end up being shared across society.
This isn’t too different from where we find ourselves with caffeine, apart from the obvious difference that a shot of espresso doesn’t quite have the ability to transform a struggling writer into a genius (believe me, I know). Caffeine is a socially normalized drug that has mild benefits in terms of wakefulness and concentration. It’s also a substance that people feel they can opt out of using without feeling that this leaves them at a social or competitive disadvantage.
Whether something as powerful as NZT could be socialized in the same way is far from certain. It would depend a lot on the perceived and real benefits and risks. But that said, it is possible to imagine a pathway forward here for a cognition-enhancing substance to become socialized, if it was affordable and widely available.
How much would change, though, if NZT was an expensive proprietary drug? Still legal, and still accessible, but in this case, only available through exclusive clinics, and affordable to the super-rich. This is a more plausible scenario, as any company making it would have to recoup their development costs, and as we know from current drug development, this can easily run into the billions of dollars.
This scenario takes us into uneasy ethical territory, and again, it’s the ethic of justice that comes into play. This is a scenario where the benefits and the burdens of NZT would not be equitably shared across society. Rather, the rich would end up having access to a technology that gave them a vast advantage over the poor, or even the middle class. Using the technology, they would be able to make even more money, wield even more power, create even more exclusive technologies, and further distance themselves from the rest of society.
This, of course, is the scenario that plays out in Limitless, but without the social commentary. The power players here are those who are on NZT or who have benefitted from it. These are the people who end up holding the reins of economic and political power, all because they have exclusive access to a mind-enhancing substance.
I must confess that this is not a scenario that I’m comfortable with. And it’s not one that I believe can be avoided through market-driven innovation alone. Without appropriate checks and balances in place, the free market simply provides a mechanism that prioritizes overall wealth creation over just and equitable wealth creation. Put simply, free-market economies can thrive on social inequity and injustice, as long as people are willing to buy and sell goods while asking few questions. And you can bet your bottom dollar that there would be a market for a smart drug that massively increased a wealthy individual’s chances of success. What is needed in a scenario like this is a system of checks and balances that help steer market forces toward social good.
Here, approaching how we ensure the benefits of new technologies while avoiding unpleasant downsides is not about stymieing technologies that threaten us—far from it. But it does involve deciding what’s important, and having the foresight and commitment to ensuring that technology innovation supports what we believe is good and worthy, and avoids what we believe is not. In the language of medical ethics, we probably want to work on innovation pathways that demonstrate non-maleficence, are beneficent, that support autonomy, and that are just.
To start with, though, we need to work out what we believe is important to us as a society. And that includes grappling with how we think about intelligence.
Our Obsession with Intelligence
As a species, we’re obsessed with intelligence. It’s what gives us our evolutionary edge, and it’s what has led to our dominance as Homo sapiens. Our intelligence is what many of us depend on in our personal and professional lives. And, when it comes to artificial forms of intelligence, it’s something that some people worry will end up destroying us. But how we think about intelligence is remarkably colored by our sense of our own importance, and this in turn affects how we think about technologies that are designed to enhance it, including smart drugs.
As a species, we’ve dominated our evolutionary niche. And we’ve done pretty well at expanding the boundaries of this niche, pushing other species out of the way as we go. As we’ve evolved, we’ve done amazingly well at learning how to use the natural resources around us to our advantage. We’ve adroitly developed the ability to imagine futures beyond the present that we inhabit. And we’ve become rather adept in crafting our own internal worlds of feelings, beliefs, desires, aspirations, and identities. We are, in our own eyes, exceptional.
This assumption of exceptionality, though, is an evolutionary illusion. We are perfectly adapted to the evolutionary niche we inhabit, but this doesn’t make us superior to any other organism that’s happily succeeding in its own niche. And yet, despite our self-aggrandizement, we are an amazing species. Our ability to individually and collectively imagine futures that are different from the present, and to make these futures a reality, is truly astounding. This doesn’t make us superior to other organisms, but it does make us interesting. And at the root of what makes us an interesting species is what we collectively think of as “intelligence.”
This is where things begin to get a little gnarly, though, because while most people would agree that human intelligence is important, there’s not so much agreement on what intelligence is exactly. And this becomes relevant as we begin to develop technologies that either claim to enhance intelligence, or to replicate it.
Understanding the nature of intelligence is, perhaps not surprisingly, something people have been grappling with for a long time. For millennia, we’ve tried to metaphorically pull ourselves up by our bootstraps by using our intelligence to better understand that selfsame intelligence. Each generation of thinkers and scholars has had its own ideas of what intelligence is, and where its value lies, and the current one is no different (although, naturally, being the most intelligent generation so far, we’re pretty sure we’re honing in on the right ideas this time64).
Broad definitions of intelligence tend to focus on our combined abilities to re
member, reason, imagine, learn, build stuff, and use knowledge and materials to actively alter the world we live in. Together, these tap into traits that differentiate us as a species from others, and in this respect “intelligence” becomes a convenient shorthand for “that which makes us different.” Plenty of scholars have tried to pin things down more precisely, though.
One school of thought that’s arisen over the past hundred years is that there is an innate characteristic of general intelligence that makes us different—a single measure, or quotient, of intelligence that captures all of humanity’s “specialness.” This was first suggested by Charles Spearman in 1904, and is the basis of generalized measures of intelligence such as the g-factor and Intelligence Quotient, or IQ. But these remain controversial measures of intelligence.
In contrast, psychologist Howard Gardner proposed the idea that there are multiple types of intelligence, representing different aspects of human abilities and “different-ness.” These include musical intelligence, visual/spatial intelligence, verbal intelligence, logical intelligence, and a whole lot more (including an “existential intelligence” that begins to tap into aspects of belief and spirituality).
In Limitless, we are introduced to an understanding of intelligence that lies somewhere between Spearman’s general intelligence and Gardner’s multiple types of intelligence. What gives Enhanced Eddie his competitive edge is his ability to remember, recall, and use information faster and better when on NZT. It’s this combination of memory, recall, speed, and utilization that boosts Eddie’s performance within the movie, and transforms him from a struggling writer to a smart and successful author, businessman, and politician. And we’re led to believe that this performance boost is synonymous with an intelligence boost. Yet this is a restrictively narrow view of intelligence, and one that leads to a rather monochromatic perspective of success—especially when it comes to technological innovation. It suggests that the most relevant aspects of intelligence are memory, speed of thought, and reasoning ability, and that what establishes their importance is the degree to which they help us “win.”
In Limitless, Eddie is transformed from a loser to a winner by NZT. In the Silicon Valley nootropic culture, taking the right “stacks” is seen as the route to winning as an entrepreneur and in business. Students take prescription drugs to win in their courses. Academics pop pills to win at grant applications, and to win at getting their papers published. And I have to assume that corporate executives self-medicate on occasion to win in business.
In other words, smart drugs are not really about intelligence, but about selectively enhancing capabilities that provide a perceived performance advantage in a given situation. It’s just that we’ve collectively fallen into the habit of thinking about a small set of attributes as defining intelligence, and assuming that these are essential to winning in life. It’s all very “survival of the fittest.” It also creates a bit of a problem. As soon as we make the mental leap of assuming better memory and enhanced reasoning make us more likely to win at what we do, we become the victims of a cognitive delusion. And this has a profound impact on how we think about the development and use of smart drugs.
If, as it’s assumed in Limitless, a single pill can increase someone’s chances of winning at whatever they are doing, we have to grapple with who gets access to this wonder pill, and what our collective norms and rules are for responsible use. This becomes challenging if the idea of someone else having a general advantage over you because of the meds they’re on becomes a serious threat to your ability to succeed, or to be seen as worthy. But if this pill only enhances someone’s chance of winning under specific circumstances, the threat it poses takes on a very different feel.
If you believe that there are multiple ways of understanding and thinking about of intelligence, and there are multiple combinations of skills needed for success, then taking the wrong smart pill for the wrong purpose could be disastrous. It’d be like taking a tab of LSD to help wrap up a grant proposal—possibly entertaining for the reviewers, but not in the way you intended. On the other hand, taking the right smart pill for the right occasion could be rather useful, especially where this notion of “winning” leads to social good. This might include effective patient treatment, for instance, or problem-solving around natural disasters.
In other words, having a clear sense of what intelligence is, and what intelligence enhancement means, is critical to the socially responsible development and use of smart drugs and intelligence-related technologies more broadly. If you believe that better memory and reason are the most important factors in winning, or in determining someone’s worth, then drugs that substantially enhance them become something to be carefully managed within society. This way of thinking leads to smart drugs being framed as a potentially divisive technology that threatens to further prize open the divide between those who have access to the technology and those who do not. If we accept, on the other hand, that personal worth is not dependent on these two factors, but is instead a complex combination of ways you enhance the lives of others, and that winning is about more than fame, fortune, and being clever, then smart drugs potentially become an asset, and one to be nurtured.
In setting out to navigate this ethical landscape, so much depends on how we think of intelligence, and this notion of “winning.” Sadly, we live in a society that values a rather narrow definition of intelligence which, intentionally or not, leaves the impression that personal worth is linked to how smart you are. This is seen in our education system, and the pressure that parents feel to do everything possible to increase their child’s IQ. It’s also seen in how we reward people, and who we assign value to in society. Yet there is little evidence that intelligence, when defined in this rather narrow way, leads to attributes like empathy, humility, kindness, and civility; all of which are profoundly important within a healthy society.65 On the contrary, intelligence as portrayed in Limitless, and as it is often perceived in real life, has no inherent moral compass. Being smart doesn’t make you good.
That said, I can imagine a future where smart drugs are a powerful technology for benefitting lives as part of a suite of technologies that we use to build a better future. But to get there, we’re first going to have to recalibrate how we think about intelligence, and how it relates to what is socially useful and beneficial. Such a recalibration is important for technologies that alter and enhance how our minds work. But it’s also critically important to how we think about and develop artificial intelligences, or hybrid human-machine intelligences because, if we start off with a warped perspective of intelligence and success, you can guarantee that the “intelligence-enhancing” technologies we develop, and the pathways we develop them along, will be equally warped.
There is a twist to this tale, though. While NZT may not make Eddie better than his peers, it certainly gives him what it takes to succeed in the life that he’s chosen. Whether you consider the drug to be intelligence-enhancing or performance-enhancing, Eddie gets ahead because he has access to it. And while the fictional pharmacology of NZT helps explain what he achieved once he started using, there’s a subtle but nevertheless important subplot to Limitless, which is that, in order to succeed, you needed to be privileged enough to have access to the smart drug in the first place. This in turn takes us to the challenges of what happens when only a privileged few have access to a powerful technology, and to the next movie: Elysium.
Chapter Six
ELYSIUM: SOCIAL INEQUITY IN AN AGE OF TECHNOLOGICAL EXTREMES
“They are armed, and I’d like them dead.”
―Carlisle
The Poor Shall Inherit the Earth
On September 17, 2011, a small group of social activists occupied Zuccotti Park in New York City. The occupation became the spearhead for the global “Occupy” movement, protesting a growing disparity between “haves” and “have-nots” within society. Two years later, the movie Elysium built on this movement as it sought to reveal the potential injustices of a technologi
cally sophisticated future where a small group of elites live in decadent luxury at the expense of the poor.
Elysium is, it has to be said, a rather earnest movie. It deals with big social issues, and it takes itself very seriously—to the point where its overly simplistic portrayals of technological innovation and greed-driven social inequality are accompanied by equally simplistic solutions. And yet, for all this, it’s a movie that shines a light on the potential dangers of new technologies benefitting the rich at the expense of the poor. It also showcases some cool tech which, while implausible in how it’s portrayed in the film, nevertheless reflects some quite amazing developments in the real world.
In 2011, just a few months before Occupy Wall Street moved into Zuccotti Park, the economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in Vanity Fair:
“The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”66
Stiglitz foreshadowed the Occupy movement, but he also touched on a deeper truth that has resonated through history—that, while there is a natural tendency for the rich to live at the expense of the poor, this is a recipe for social and economic disaster in the long term. And while he didn’t explicitly call out the potential impacts of emerging technologies on social inequity, it’s hard to ignore the ways in which science and technology can, if not developed and used responsibly, deepen the divide between those who live comfortable, privileged lives, and those who do not.
This is a theme that the movie Elysium piles on in spades. In the film, the rich are pampered by every conceivable technological innovation, living lives of luxury in grand mansions on a Beverly Hills-like space habitat, looked after by subservient AI robots, and living long, healthy lives in perfect bodies, courtesy of home-based medical pods that can cure every ill and erase every blemish. In contrast, the poor have inherited an Earth that has none of these advantages, and instead feels more like the impoverished slums of a Brazilian favela, or some of the less salubrious parts of LA. And rather than being served by technology, these communities are suppressed by it.
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