6 ms·

I say throw ethics out the door. In sports the idea is to entertain and compete fairly so steroids reduce the value of sports. Memory and math? What is this a

I say throw ethics out the door. In sports the idea is to entertain and compete fairly so steroids reduce the value of sports. Memory and math? What is this a competition? Why on earth would you not want to increase your capacity for memory and math? The analogy is that steroids are to a mover as this thing is to an engineer. Do you really care how your mover found his strength?

samt 15y ago
This is a classic arms race. Like states giving tax breaks to invent corporations to move. Just like baseball we are probably all better off with some rules.
- learc83 15y ago
  Considering anyone who knows which end of a soldering iron is hot could build one of these with access to the schematic, it's going to be impossible to enforce any limits on its use.
ahelwer 15y ago
These are more similar than you have presented. Athletes compete for contracts at the highest levels. If some athletes use performance enhancing drugs, they will have an edge and pressure will be put on those who do not want to use performance enhancing drugs, for any number of reasons. On the intellectual side of things, you have students competing for scholarships, grants, and research placements. You have people competing for jobs in high-tech industries, and then competing with their colleagues for promotions, pay raises, and bonuses. I'm sure you can come up with more examples. The same problem then exists with devices or drugs which purport to improve learning ability. I could take dextroamphetamine every day. My productivity could go through the roof and I could soak up information like a sponge, easily putting within my grasp that which I strive to accomplish every day. Yet I do not want to do this, for many reasons. Maybe the device in the article lacks the side effects of regular amphetamine use. It therefore would not be on the same level as nootropic drugs, but saying we should 'throw ethics out the door' is quite a leap.
- ntkachov 15y ago
  But the point of those two industries is different. On the STEM side of things why wouldn't you want the kid that will give you the most bang for your buck? Whats the point of holding ourselves back just to create a fair playing field for everyone else. If we can get 100 engineers with brain boosters to do the job of 1000 engineers why not? At the same time athletes surve a different purpose. They entertain. The perception of a fair playing field is much more important to a bottom line than the actual performance of a person. No one wants to watch a machine pitch a perfect pitch every time. Likewise no one wants to watch a juiced up player hit a home run every time. Theres no spectacle in that.
  - cousin_it 15y ago
    What if you're using engineers to get better at some zero-sum game, e.g. high frequency trading, SEO or developing better weapons? When your competitors start using brain-boosted engineers too, you're back to square one, except everyone's wasting resources on brain-boosting and cannot afford to stop.
  - notahacker 15y ago
    Except the "kid that will give you the most bang for your buck" might be aware he's slightly below the best in the pile when not more artificially stimulated than the competition. Artificial stimulants might deliver a payload rather more disturbing than cumulative intelligence gain when applied systematically over a period in an intelligence arms race: we know a few other ways of stimulating certain aspects of the mind that aren't entirely benign. As for entertainment, I'd probably not object to watching steroid-pumped athletes if I was confident they wouldn't end up with anger-management and biological gender disorders afterwards. Same applies to stimulating the brain with electrodes, except we don't know where/whether that might go wrong yet. Ben Johnson wasn't competing to run the world; but at the risk of invoking Godwin's law, the track record of those using stimulants to help them run the world isn't great.
  - CamperBob 15y ago
    Likewise no one wants to watch a juiced up player hit a home run every time. Theres no spectacle in that. Be careful with such sweeping statements. I think it'd be cool as hell to watch athletic competitions that were really just proxies for various performance-enhancing labs to show off their latest, greatest stuff. I don't watch the Tour de France now, for instance, but if all of those riders were openly doping and tweaking to expand their limits in new and interesting ways, I probably would. Pro athletes already make sacrifices that the rest of us would consider horrific, wrecking their health and shortening their lifespans for the sake of a few years of glory and attention. What's suggested here is absolutely nothing new.
hello_moto 15y ago
Sounds like ambitions and greed have blurred together.
JOnAgain 15y ago
The ethical question comes up because these won't be free. There's already a large and widening gap between those who have and those who don't. Particularly in America, who your parents are have a very large impact on your potential as an individual -- access to schools, materials, etc. With a widening gap, would such a device further increase the gap between those who go on to be the "have's" vs. the "have nots"? Would this introduce a more substantial barrier to entry for the upper class? What if the device cost $1000? What if it cost $1000/month? What would happen to society if 50% or more of society was structurally unable to move up in the class system? There is unrest today (occupy protests) and the common perception is that it isn't even a big problem in the US yet. How bad would it get if people actually thought it was as bad as it is? And then what if it got worse? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...
- learc83 15y ago
  From an engineering perspective, the device is simple enough that it should be universally available in the US, and probably the world. People have built DIY models for under $50. With full scale production you could build a basic model for a few dollars.
  - derleth 15y ago
    > With full scale production you could build a basic model for a few dollars. Plus the cost of patent licenses, of course.
    - learc83 15y ago
      From what I've read I don't believe there are any patents covering the basic concepts. Additionally patents expire after 20 years, and there is definitely prior art covering the basic device going back at least to the 60s. There may be patents covering some specific implementations, but I believe one could design a patent free device fairly easily.
    - politician 15y ago
tzs 15y ago
There are ways to misuse this general kind of technology. You are seeing it as a cheap doodad that will stimulate a brain area that, when stimulated, improves learning. That's a good thing. But consider that as research continues, they will probably find that other effects can be achieved by stimulating other brain areas in other ways. Perhaps they will find an area that enhances reading comprehension, or musical ability, or objectivity. So imagine we reach a state where we have general purpose brain stimulators in most schools, that can be programmed to stimulate the appropriate part of the brain in the appropriate way for a given lesson. Great, right? Now consider this. One researcher has already reported that he can induce by brain stimulation a mystical or religious state, where subjects often report feeling they are in the presence of God. If the school stimulators could be programmed for this kind of stimulation, they could turn into a powerful tool for religious indoctrination. I would not at all be surprised, if the religious inducement turns out to be true (I believe it has not been replicated yet) that they will find other deep emotional things can be induced, such as feeling of national pride and patriotism. I'm sure I don't need to say anything about the potential abuse of that if every public school has a programmable brain stimulator. This is why we don't throw ethics out the door--we need a way to make the good aspects of this available (boosting memory and math) WITHOUT just blindly getting the bad parts.
- ntkachov 15y ago
  I agree 100% with what you are talking about. And such misuses of a device like this could be dangerous if not deadly. We should absolutely regulate such a device and control its use. When I say throw ethics out the door I specifically mean ethical questions that would pose a problem for institutions such as universities. I feel like what you are talking about falls more under the category of health rather than ethics but the line between them here is very very thin.
cop359 15y ago
The ethical problem in my mind is that by taking brain boosting meds you are taking a health risk. So for instance, say the people that take these meds end up living 5 years less on average due to side effects of the drugs but are for instance able to read 2 times fast, remember thing better and only need 5 hours of sleep a day. Naturally because they're on average better they will get better jobs, more promotions and so on. So the people that choose not to trade in years of their life end up getting screwed (in relative terms) and (taken to the extreme - say 50 years down the road) will be second class citizens. To a very minor degree this happens with caffeen, but when you put things in the equation like amphetamines and provigil it gets a lot scarier. If I was taking amphetamines and provigil in college I know for certain I would have graduated with a lot higher GPA and I probably would have done a lot more in college. But what would have been the cost? I don't know.. and know one really can say; I wasn't willing to take that gamble. Why should the person that was willing to gamble his health get rewarded for it?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- tim_h 15y ago
  There's a sad real-world example of people who are willing to shorten their lives in order to earn more money: the sulphur miners of East Java ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12301421 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12301421 ). The motivations are a bit different in this case - the miners are doing this to be in a little less poverty - but the net effect I think is to make things a bit harder for the people who choose to take lower-paying jobs and not to put their lives at such risk (since the miners who have more money presumably get first dibs on available food to purchase).
- funthree 15y ago
  Your thoughts on caffience, amphetamines, and indeed this device are wholly correct. It is somewhat saddening...
- Dn_Ab 15y ago
  As I noted in another post this device looks like more of a memory and learning aid rather than targeting IQ. My lay hypothesis is that this device works by increasing the baseline of current flow at target synapses - kind of like waking the guard of a gate to a vigilant state. Basically, it enhances long term potentiation. I expect it will have a very low addictive profile and improper use will probably be toxic in a similar mechanism as glutamate overload. No worse than people who consume alchohol regularly do to themselves. Probably much safer. High currents might cause seizures though.
gtani 15y ago
well, it's a slippery dialog. I think most people don't really care that much about pro athletes taking EPO, but the crackdowns started when it filtered down to widespread use in high school athletes of HGH and designer steroids. At one point the argument that spending $1,000s of dollars to test one athlete at the Olympic games was a waste of money. But, well, when i read this, I must say, i have people close to me who would have access to this technology and understand the risks, and I thought, hmm.

samt 15y ago

This is a classic arms race. Like states giving tax breaks to invent corporations to move. Just like baseball we are probably all better off with some rules.

learc83 15y ago
Considering anyone who knows which end of a soldering iron is hot could build one of these with access to the schematic, it's going to be impossible to enforce any limits on its use.

ahelwer 15y ago

These are more similar than you have presented. Athletes compete for contracts at the highest levels. If some athletes use performance enhancing drugs, they will have an edge and pressure will be put on those who do not want to use performance enhancing drugs, for any number of reasons. On the intellectual side of things, you have students competing for scholarships, grants, and research placements. You have people competing for jobs in high-tech industries, and then competing with their colleagues for promotions, pay raises, and bonuses. I'm sure you can come up with more examples. The same problem then exists with devices or drugs which purport to improve learning ability. I could take dextroamphetamine every day. My productivity could go through the roof and I could soak up information like a sponge, easily putting within my grasp that which I strive to accomplish every day. Yet I do not want to do this, for many reasons. Maybe the device in the article lacks the side effects of regular amphetamine use. It therefore would not be on the same level as nootropic drugs, but saying we should 'throw ethics out the door' is quite a leap.

ntkachov 15y ago
But the point of those two industries is different. On the STEM side of things why wouldn't you want the kid that will give you the most bang for your buck? Whats the point of holding ourselves back just to create a fair playing field for everyone else. If we can get 100 engineers with brain boosters to do the job of 1000 engineers why not? At the same time athletes surve a different purpose. They entertain. The perception of a fair playing field is much more important to a bottom line than the actual performance of a person. No one wants to watch a machine pitch a perfect pitch every time. Likewise no one wants to watch a juiced up player hit a home run every time. Theres no spectacle in that.
- cousin_it 15y ago
  What if you're using engineers to get better at some zero-sum game, e.g. high frequency trading, SEO or developing better weapons? When your competitors start using brain-boosted engineers too, you're back to square one, except everyone's wasting resources on brain-boosting and cannot afford to stop.
- notahacker 15y ago
  Except the "kid that will give you the most bang for your buck" might be aware he's slightly below the best in the pile when not more artificially stimulated than the competition. Artificial stimulants might deliver a payload rather more disturbing than cumulative intelligence gain when applied systematically over a period in an intelligence arms race: we know a few other ways of stimulating certain aspects of the mind that aren't entirely benign. As for entertainment, I'd probably not object to watching steroid-pumped athletes if I was confident they wouldn't end up with anger-management and biological gender disorders afterwards. Same applies to stimulating the brain with electrodes, except we don't know where/whether that might go wrong yet. Ben Johnson wasn't competing to run the world; but at the risk of invoking Godwin's law, the track record of those using stimulants to help them run the world isn't great.
- CamperBob 15y ago
  Likewise no one wants to watch a juiced up player hit a home run every time. Theres no spectacle in that. Be careful with such sweeping statements. I think it'd be cool as hell to watch athletic competitions that were really just proxies for various performance-enhancing labs to show off their latest, greatest stuff. I don't watch the Tour de France now, for instance, but if all of those riders were openly doping and tweaking to expand their limits in new and interesting ways, I probably would. Pro athletes already make sacrifices that the rest of us would consider horrific, wrecking their health and shortening their lifespans for the sake of a few years of glory and attention. What's suggested here is absolutely nothing new.

hello_moto 15y ago

Sounds like ambitions and greed have blurred together.

JOnAgain 15y ago

The ethical question comes up because these won't be free. There's already a large and widening gap between those who have and those who don't. Particularly in America, who your parents are have a very large impact on your potential as an individual -- access to schools, materials, etc. With a widening gap, would such a device further increase the gap between those who go on to be the "have's" vs. the "have nots"? Would this introduce a more substantial barrier to entry for the upper class? What if the device cost $1000? What if it cost $1000/month? What would happen to society if 50% or more of society was structurally unable to move up in the class system? There is unrest today (occupy protests) and the common perception is that it isn't even a big problem in the US yet. How bad would it get if people actually thought it was as bad as it is? And then what if it got worse? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...

learc83 15y ago
From an engineering perspective, the device is simple enough that it should be universally available in the US, and probably the world. People have built DIY models for under $50. With full scale production you could build a basic model for a few dollars.
- derleth 15y ago
  > With full scale production you could build a basic model for a few dollars. Plus the cost of patent licenses, of course.
  - learc83 15y ago
    From what I've read I don't believe there are any patents covering the basic concepts. Additionally patents expire after 20 years, and there is definitely prior art covering the basic device going back at least to the 60s. There may be patents covering some specific implementations, but I believe one could design a patent free device fairly easily.
  - politician 15y ago

tzs 15y ago

There are ways to misuse this general kind of technology. You are seeing it as a cheap doodad that will stimulate a brain area that, when stimulated, improves learning. That's a good thing. But consider that as research continues, they will probably find that other effects can be achieved by stimulating other brain areas in other ways. Perhaps they will find an area that enhances reading comprehension, or musical ability, or objectivity. So imagine we reach a state where we have general purpose brain stimulators in most schools, that can be programmed to stimulate the appropriate part of the brain in the appropriate way for a given lesson. Great, right? Now consider this. One researcher has already reported that he can induce by brain stimulation a mystical or religious state, where subjects often report feeling they are in the presence of God. If the school stimulators could be programmed for this kind of stimulation, they could turn into a powerful tool for religious indoctrination. I would not at all be surprised, if the religious inducement turns out to be true (I believe it has not been replicated yet) that they will find other deep emotional things can be induced, such as feeling of national pride and patriotism. I'm sure I don't need to say anything about the potential abuse of that if every public school has a programmable brain stimulator. This is why we don't throw ethics out the door--we need a way to make the good aspects of this available (boosting memory and math) WITHOUT just blindly getting the bad parts.

ntkachov 15y ago
I agree 100% with what you are talking about. And such misuses of a device like this could be dangerous if not deadly. We should absolutely regulate such a device and control its use. When I say throw ethics out the door I specifically mean ethical questions that would pose a problem for institutions such as universities. I feel like what you are talking about falls more under the category of health rather than ethics but the line between them here is very very thin.

cop359 15y ago

The ethical problem in my mind is that by taking brain boosting meds you are taking a health risk. So for instance, say the people that take these meds end up living 5 years less on average due to side effects of the drugs but are for instance able to read 2 times fast, remember thing better and only need 5 hours of sleep a day. Naturally because they're on average better they will get better jobs, more promotions and so on. So the people that choose not to trade in years of their life end up getting screwed (in relative terms) and (taken to the extreme - say 50 years down the road) will be second class citizens. To a very minor degree this happens with caffeen, but when you put things in the equation like amphetamines and provigil it gets a lot scarier. If I was taking amphetamines and provigil in college I know for certain I would have graduated with a lot higher GPA and I probably would have done a lot more in college. But what would have been the cost? I don't know.. and know one really can say; I wasn't willing to take that gamble. Why should the person that was willing to gamble his health get rewarded for it?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
tim_h 15y ago
There's a sad real-world example of people who are willing to shorten their lives in order to earn more money: the sulphur miners of East Java ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12301421 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12301421 ). The motivations are a bit different in this case - the miners are doing this to be in a little less poverty - but the net effect I think is to make things a bit harder for the people who choose to take lower-paying jobs and not to put their lives at such risk (since the miners who have more money presumably get first dibs on available food to purchase).
funthree 15y ago
Your thoughts on caffience, amphetamines, and indeed this device are wholly correct. It is somewhat saddening...
Dn_Ab 15y ago
As I noted in another post this device looks like more of a memory and learning aid rather than targeting IQ. My lay hypothesis is that this device works by increasing the baseline of current flow at target synapses - kind of like waking the guard of a gate to a vigilant state. Basically, it enhances long term potentiation. I expect it will have a very low addictive profile and improper use will probably be toxic in a similar mechanism as glutamate overload. No worse than people who consume alchohol regularly do to themselves. Probably much safer. High currents might cause seizures though.

gtani 15y ago

well, it's a slippery dialog. I think most people don't really care that much about pro athletes taking EPO, but the crackdowns started when it filtered down to widespread use in high school athletes of HGH and designer steroids. At one point the argument that spending $1,000s of dollars to test one athlete at the Olympic games was a waste of money. But, well, when i read this, I must say, i have people close to me who would have access to this technology and understand the risks, and I thought, hmm.