A Reporter at Large: Brain Gain: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
And yet when enthusiasts share their vision of our neuroenhanced future it can sound dystopian. Zack Lynch, of NeuroInsights, gave me a rationale for smart pills that I found particularly grim. “If you’re a fifty-five-year-old in Boston, you have to compete with a twenty-six-year-old from Mumbai now, and those kinds of pressures are only going to grow,” he began. Countries other than the U.S. might tend to be a little looser with their regulations, and offer approval of new cognitive enhancers first. “And if you’re a company that’s got forty-seven offices worldwide, and all of a sudden your Singapore office is using cognitive enablers, and you’re saying to Congress, ‘I’m moving all my financial operations to Singapore and Taiwan, because it’s legal to use those there,’ you bet that Congress is going to say, ‘Well, O.K.’ It will be a moot question then. It would be like saying, ‘No, you can’t use a cell phone. It might increase productivity!’ ”
From Metafilter.
And I do not know where I stand on this. One side of me wants to throw the towel in and just say the Rat Race is officially past me by and fuck it. Now you have to take drugs to get ahed in the job market? BAH! Then another says, wouldn't it be great to get my brain fired up like it was when I was 16? There is a scary and a fun side to it but knowing human nature I'll go with the scary side prevailing.
