Debate: Would you–or should you–undergo medical treatments to improve your body and mind and your chances of employment?

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The future of work is med­ical­ly enhanced ‘elite super-work­ers,’ report says (Lad­ders):

“In the future, we will be com­pet­ing against med­ical­ly-enhanced work­ers who can work longer and hard­er than us. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence will make it eas­i­er to mon­i­tor our every move in the office. This may sound like sci­ence fic­tion, but it’s a like­ly real­i­ty, accord­ing to a new report by pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices firm PricewaterhouseCoopers…Seventy per­cent of the work­ers sur­veyed said that they would under­go treat­ments to improve their body and mind if it would improve their chances of employ­ment. This could be because we believe it’s up to us to improve our careers — even if that means pill-pop­ping per­for­mance-enhanc­ing drugs. Of those sur­veyed, 74% said it was their indi­vid­ual respon­si­bil­i­ty “to update their skills rather than rely­ing on any employ­er.” … Com­pa­nies in the U.S. and Europe are already offer­ing microchip implants to work­ers, so they can enter com­pa­ny build­ings and get their chips from the vend­ing machine with the wave of a hand.”

The Neu­rotech Rev­o­lu­tion Could Lead To ‘Franken­stein’ Brains. Here’s How We Avoid It (Forbes):

“…To what extent are enhance­ments desir­able on a per­son­al and soci­etal lev­els? … If a device can enhance deci­sion-mak­ing, how will the user know that’s it’s tru­ly their deci­sion, in their best inter­est, rather than being manip­u­lat­ed by the device designers?

Try­ing to antic­i­pate such con­cerns, the World Eco­nom­ic Forum cre­at­ed last year a Coun­cil on the Future of Human Enhance­ment. A diverse group of 20+ research and indus­try lead­ers, our objec­tive is to pro­vide pio­neers and all inno­va­tion stake­hold­ers with a roadmap to har­ness the oppor­tu­ni­ty in a pos­i­tive direc­tion, avoid­ing what we could call a “Franken­stein effect”.

From our work so far, we believe that Human Enhance­ment tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tions should meet each and every of these 3 characteristics:

1. Increase func­tion­al abil­i­ties need­ed to improve qual­i­ty of life across the life span (oth­er­wise it’d be an exer­cise of van­i­ty or point­less tinkering)

2. Ensure durable and ben­e­fi­cial effects (not just momen­tary ones, and cer­tain­ly not long-term counterproductive)

3. Trans­fer to wider soci­etal ben­e­fits, help­ing make com­mu­ni­ties more inclu­sive, cohe­sive, and resilient (help­ing bridge, not expand, a Cog­ni­tive Divide)

Debate in Context