Anders Sandberg, gets quoted on the emerging debate on smart drugs and their impact upon the education system in the future. Critics have a dangerous vision of self-medicating nerds plotting to ace their exams and pull ahead of their rivals rather than working out occult symbols, raising D’hoffryn, and attempting to end the world.
“Cod liver oil is taken as a cognitive enhancer,” says Dr Anders Sandberg, a neuroscientist at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which investigates how technology will affect the human race.
“Even something as simple as eating a biscuit at the right moment can improve your performance, yet no one would complain about that except your dentist. It doesn’t matter how you bring about change. What matters is the result.
“Surely, anything that improves the ability to learn is a good thing,” says Dr Sandberg.
Smart drugs are an emergent tool and the Times Educational Supplement acknowledges that there are forty in production. Modafinil and ritalin are known quantities but “brain botox” sounds really scary. I have this vision that the drug erases all neural wrinkles and a race of golden haired cuckoos reduce their school to ash and then mingle menacingly round the local offy, destroying the effects of the drugs with a liberal dose of cider.
Amusement aside, there is a report expected from government in the next month on the rules that could govern ‘smart drugs’. This will be one of the strongest tests yet, of how the government plans to resolve the tension between the right to self-medicate and their horror of self-improvement. People who abolish grammars will not promote cognitive enhancement: they are unlikely to abandon mediocrity after it has taken them so many decades to achieve.
Ahhh, make it equally available to all students, I’d say, since it’s not likely you can control it anyway.
After all, if these drugs are available for exams, then they must surely be available to working adults as well, yet few people discuss the implications of white collar workers consuming such drugs to enhance their productivity.
There are two problems I see: undesirable side effects and adaptation. My suspicion is that the body may gradually adapt to these drugs with prolonged exposure as they work on the body physiology through receptors. Their effect would decrease, along with a corresponding decrease in performance.
Better to save the drugs for critical situations. It’s like training for the Tour de France like normal, then using the drugs for that extra boost during the event.
Oops, sorry. Bad example. :X
Don’t worry. Once they decide an embargo against these wonderdrugs, they’ll have a field day with all the artificial job creation that will come with the game. I imagine mandatory drug testing on campuses, and a nastier, reborn, social and legislative jihad against pharmaceuticals. The glimmer of hope is how the left- leaning, college activist atmosphere will approach this. A new libertarian, pro-capitalist response would be sweet.
Nice to get quoted here too. I will actually be doing a lecture/discussion about academic enhancement in Cambridge on Sunday(Link), so I’m quite interested in hearing your concerns.
Making drugs equally available is an interesting problem, since different people react to them differently (and doubtless some parents will refuse). Is it enough to have enhancement vouchers?
Deep down we of course have the issues surrounding mandatory education – if education is so good at making us autonomous individuals that it has to be mandatory, then some enhancers might eventually also contribute enough to this that they ought to be mandatory. While I think even most libertarians would agree vaccines are close to that level, I would expect that most of us are a bit less eager to force biomedical changes on people.
Safety is going to be an interesting issue, especially since the most promising target is the developing brain. All the current ethical problems about medication for the young are going to be twice as nasty for enhancement.
But the irony is that we think nothing of drinking tea and coffee, that various (often spurious(Link)) “brain training exercises” are widely used and parents happily eat diets supposed to make their kids better off (some of which actually can cause beneficial gene expression changes). Very little (if any) research looks at the ethics and safety of these “natural” methods. Or even the safety of education itself – it is not obvious or likely that it just has beneficial effects.
From the article,
“and scientists believe that in 20 years they could find their way into the classroom.”
They’re already there. Before the high-stakes SAT, I made a run to the water fountain to down a handful of pills available to anyone with a credit card in the US. Of course, I didn’t neglect to have a cup of tea beforehand. Caffeine is still indispensable.
“Better to save the drugs for critical situations. It’s like training for the Tour de France like normal, then using the drugs for that extra boost during the event.”
The drugs I use are extra-helpful at improving retention when studying, so it doesn’t hurt to use them constantly. Most of them are used to treat Alzheimer’s disease, and are quite harmless even at high doses. The article fails to distinguish these from the gamut of drugs used to treat ADHD, which I wouldn’t touch without a legitimate medical need.
Very interesting, especially the final sentence on the government’s desire for mediocrity. As I live in the states, I’m not aware how far the British government has come in their quest to remake the world in the image of “Harrison Bergeron”. Just happy I went to a private school free of the government’s stranglehold. Do they have truly private independent schools in Britain?
But I digress. Anders, I like what you say about the necessity of education. I’ve always felt that the government (referring to the US government in particular, but any will do) needs to get out of the business of public education, or at least make it voluntary. Unfortunately, this could lead to an uneducated populace and chaos. So your assertion that mandatory (public) education may be necessary is very interesting. I just fear a slippery slope, since the government can find anything “necessary”. All well.
I’m not sure a totally voluntary education system would produce massive ignorance and chaos: those who are unwilling to learn don’t learn much today either, and lack of education at a young age might drive up demand for later age education. But it might be that we should make the most out of early age learning abilities and that the socialisation aspects of being together in school are important. It is hard to tell; we really ought to send a horde of sociologists to study comparable villages in (say) India with or without education and follow up the kids in 20 years.
One of the interesting aspects of cognition enhancers is that they might enable brains to regain neural branching that was not developed due to an impoverished upbringing. At least one paper suggests this for a cholinergic drug, but it was just tested in mice.