Peter Thiel
Credit: Reuters Photo
By Parmy Olson
Peter Thiel’s Enhanced Games promise to be an annual sporting event that lets athletes use performance-enhancing drugs, nicknamed the pro-doping Olympics (which some would scoff isn’t all that different from the real thing). The games have captured imaginations and, now, money. But behind them is a broader, unsettling effort spearheaded by tech billionaires like Thiel to use science and technology to enhance the human race.
Their vision sounds alluring: If we can lengthen our lifespans and augment our brains and productivity, we’ll live a life of leisure, powered by robots and funded by universal basic income. But they rarely mention that utopia could come with a price, too, eroding human agency and perhaps even worsening inequality.
The list of tech titans chasing human enhancement is long. Thiel, best known for being an early investor in Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, has poured millions of dollars into longevity research and has reportedly signed up for cryonic preservation. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman also plans to preserve his brain upon his death so that his mind can be become one with the hyperintelligent artificial intelligence systems he is developing. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he once told MIT Technology Review.
Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos is trying to reverse aging, while Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have also poured money into immortality research. Elon Musk is trying to enhance human cognition with brain implants through Neuralink Corp. — which will put its device in a second human patient in a week or so — while online-payments entrepreneur Bryan Johnson is trying to reverse his biological age by getting blood transfusions from his son.
Christian Angermeyer, a tech investor running Thiel’s Enhanced Games, has written that we should expect several waves of human enhancement, with the first generation marked by mass adoption of weight-loss medications like Ozempic and Wegovy, followed by drugs that can tackle muscle degeneration for older people and enhance cognition. Psychedelics that can address mental health issues will follow, before what he describes as the final wave: “transhumanism” through brain implants.
This isn’t just the techno-optimist philosophy normally associated with Silicon Valley — that complex biological and social issues are just like engineering problems it is best placed to solve. It’s also a contemporary resurgence of something like transhumanism, the theory that humans can evolve past their physical limits with the help of science and technology.
Technologists who take this idea to its extreme believe that the merger of humans with computers isn’t just possible, but necessary. Musk has told his Neuralink scientists to work with a “maniacal sense of urgency” to deploy his brain implants so humans can defend themselves against future rogue AI. Google’s Page is so enamored with the idea that computers will one day spawn digital beings that Musk said Page called him a “speciesist” for favoring human life over digital life forms.
The problem with all this urgency and zeal is that it can lead to ends-justify-the-means thinking, which doesn’t bode well for a philosophy with disconcerting roots. Transhumanism was coined in 1957 by the biologist Julian Huxley, a leading figure in the British eugenics movement who saw the idea as a more scientifically grounded way to improve humans. He pushed for “positive eugenics,” encouraging “genetically superior” people to reproduce, for instance, instead of pushing for forced sterilization among “idlers” and those who were deemed mentally unfit.
While the likes of Thiel, Musk, Page and Altman aren’t advocating eugenics, they are pursuing similar objectives to transhumanism. Given their power and influence, that shouldn’t be dismissed as wacky, but scrutinised for the possible repercussions in the long term. Thiel didn’t respond to a request for comment.
One potential victim is the value of human achievement itself. Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality and author, has argued that we should resist technological enhancement if we want to maintain an economy where people earn their own way — and invent their own lives. “If you structure a society on not emphasizing individual human agency, it’s the same thing operationally as denying people clout, dignity, and self-determination,” he was quoted as saying by author Jonathan Taplin.
Economic inequalities could also worsen in a world where enhanced individuals get an edge in education and in job markets — or become a new, biological elite with superior health. Angermeyer, who was the subject of a Bloomberg Businessweek profile on Thursday, is batting away criticism from the International Olympic Committee that he is destroying “any concept of fair play and fair competition in sport.” But the committee is right. For all the cheating that does go on in the Olympics, the effort to create a level playing field is what makes its sporting achievements so meaningful.
One partner at a venture capital firm summed things up best for me on the sidelines of a recent tech party: The real benefits of artificial general intelligence (AGI) will come when people with brain implants can suddenly become the smartest ones in the room. Technologists, in other words, are eager to get a competitive edge on everyone else.
The techno-optimist view that science and technology can “enhance” human life has long reigned in Silicon Valley, but every innovation has a price and unexpected complexities. The utopia that their enhancement tech will lead to is far from certain.