I.
In college, I became obsessed with weightlifting. I missed zero workouts. I meticulously tracked various performance metrics and charted the changes over time, allowing me to see what worked and what didn’t. When I wasn’t training, I was researching. I read every book on the subject that I could get my hands on. I spent countless hours on weightlifting blogs, forums, subreddits, podcasts, and YouTube tutorials. I spent more time studying for my workouts than I did for class.
When you spend a lot of time in a gym, you quickly start to identify certain groups of people. You’ve got the yoga chicks, the cardio bunnies, the dudebros, the New-Years-Resolutioners (for a limited time only), and more. For the most part, they leave each other alone and segregate themselves off into different corners of the gym. I liked it there. People were friendly and supportive. But there was one group that always irritated me: the lifters that were very obviously using steroids. Something about them annoyed me. In a few weeks, they could get the sorts of results that would take me months or years of training. It felt unfair. At the same time, all of my research had left me keenly aware of all of the negative health consequences of steroid use. I experienced this mixture of inferiority and superiority – inferiority over my weak performance compared to my steroid-using peers, and superiority over my refusal to “cheat” and compromise my health in the process.
But after a while, it occurred to me how weird this fixation was. Steroid users don’t hurt anyone but themselves. It really shouldn’t be any of my concern. Yet somehow, steroid users had gotten under my skin. I wanted to understand that. So, I decided to research performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) with an open mind.
II.
The first step is to define PEDs. Wikipedia defines PEDs as “agents that improve performance at activities such as athletics, mental endurance, work and resistance to stress.” My first impression is that this is super broad. Under this definition, the coffee I’m sipping as I type these words is a PED. Caffeine is a stimulant that temporarily blocks adenosine receptors, which induces drowsiness. There’s a reason caffeine is the world’s most popular psychoactive drug – it works. It succeeds in boosting performance in most mental tasks (and, in large enough doses, it can boost physical performance as well). This begs the question, “why is caffeine considered perfectly acceptable, but steroids are not?”
This mainly boils down to side effects. Caffeine has few negative side effects, all of which are temporary and only occur at high dosages. For most people, most of the time, small to moderate caffeine consumption is a net positive. So, performance-boosting chemicals aren’t inherently bad. Most people use them regularly, even if they don’t think of them in those terms. This begs the question: if PEDs had zero negative side effects, would there be any problem with using them? Based on what I’d learned, I’d have to say no.
Another complaint about PEDs is that they aren’t “natural.” Being “natural” is imbued with this kind of moral judgment; since PEDs involve injecting foreign chemicals into your body, they’re viewed as impure. My own misgivings about PEDs included this sentiment. But as I tried to learn about the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural,” I found that the line between the two was blurrier than I thought. What does it mean for something to be natural? Most athletes consume perfectly-measured portions of food, with precise macronutrient distributions. This is anything but natural. They also use any and every supplement that could grant even the smallest advantage. Dive into the kitchen of any serious athlete, and you’ll find huge tubs of various protein powders, creatine, vitamin supplements, pills - anything that isn’t banned in the competition. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors certainly never knew anything like this. This dichotomy of “natural = good” and “man-made = bad” crumbles under close examination. If we use health and athletic performance as indicators of what is good or bad, it would seem that man-made supplements are winning. Sure, modern junk food is bad, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater is no solution. Man-made interventions can, and do, help people.
III.
Many people have a visceral aversion to the idea of enhancements. Many familiar objections arise. “Enhancement is unnatural” is a common criticism. This is true. Enhancement is unnatural. But humans left the realm of the “natural” a long time ago. Today, our lives are saturated with routine medical procedures that would appear alien and threatening to our ancestors. As a result of this, infant mortality has plunged and life expectancy has more than doubled over the past two centuries. Antibiotics, open-heart surgery, pacemakers, anesthesia, organ transplants, and such are all terribly “unnatural” in the most literal sense of the word. And yet, few of us would want to live in a world without them. So, too, will future generations not wish to live without enhancements.
Consider the case of cognitive enhancements. Technologists have proposed technologies that could conceivably increase mental capacity in humans. Many oppose this. Most criticisms of enhancement come in two forms. The first is that such technology would be ripe for abuse. This is a reasonable concern, and will require an entire essay to address. But for now, I want to focus on the second criticism: that enhancement is unnatural. Again, that is true. But, as we have established above, being “unnatural” does not automatically make something bad. Additionally, the complete rejection of any form of cognitive enhancement has one large problem: we’re already doing it.
The Flynn effect is the observed phenomenon that the average IQ of people in developed countries has been increasing by 3 points per decade since at least the 1930s (and possibly longer). The exact cause of the Flynn effect is unclear, although the persistence of the effect is surprising. It implies that people born today have IQs nearly 30 points higher than people born a century ago - a staggering increase with no historical precedent.
This raises a few questions.
Clearly, the IQ of a person born today is unnaturally high by historical standards. Our cognitive abilities have been enhanced. Does that imply that our collectively higher IQs are a bad thing? Would anyone want to go back to the 1930s, in which people had nearly 30 fewer IQ points?
Would anyone willingly sacrifice 30 IQ points in the name of “being natural?”
Many people are already happily enjoying the perks of cognitive enhancements. It just doesn’t feel that way, since the process was slow, invisible, and accidental. If such incredible enhancements can be made unintentionally, how much more could we achieve if we actively worked towards it?
IV.
I began with a discussion of intentional performance enhancement in athletes, and I ended with a discussion of unintentional cognitive enhancement in the general population. Enhancement is already here. It isn’t going away anytime soon. As technology advances, we can expect enhancement to play an ever-growing role in our lives. To deny this reality is no solution. Perhaps the best way to increase the risk of harmful enhancement practices is to drive it underground. If we want enhancement to develop in a way that is a net positive for humanity, we must proactively clear a path for these technologies to grow.